Smothered Words

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by Sarah Kofman,

Translated by Madeleine Dobie

Northwestern University Press

Due/Published December 1998, 96 pages, cloth

ISBN 0810115050

The first english-language edition of Kofman's personal look at the ethics of representing the holocaust. In it, she discusses her father's deportation and death at Auschwitz, and juxtaposes various readings of work by Blanchot, relections on Robert Antelme's account of his deportation to a German prison in The Human Race, and her own recognition of having outlived her father and survived the holocaust. Her consideration here serves as a mediation on the contrasting imperatives of history, autobiography, and critical writing.

Kofman committed suicide in 1995. Smothered Words addresses both the effects on representation of the emotional suffering of the survivors along with the ethical questions of representing the Holocaust. Kofman explores the relationships and tensions among autobiographical, historical, and philosophical approaches to writing the Holocaust.

Review

Attempts to understand Auschwitz have been made through historical and more philosophical inquiries. Kofman, a major but often unrecognized thinker, began this work as an interpretation of Maurice Blanchot’s writings on Auschwitz but ended up including her father’s story and Robert Antelme’s memoir of his experience in a German concentration camp, The Human Race. Kofman’s work is a compelling, if not intriguing meditation on a variety of issues: the question of representing history, the relation of critic to author, and the fate of ethics in a Post-Auschwitz world. Kofman resists easy answers and frameworks, ultimately seeing Auschwitz as an event whose interpretations are in many ways is best left unfinished. One of the more notable aspects of the book is the first published account of Kofman’s father’s deportation to Auschwitz and death because of his refusal to work on the Sabbath. Interestingly when she initially describes his father’s deportation she relies on statistics avoiding the potential for pathos and more intimate descriptions and in so doing calls into question the method of personal history. Kofman also discusses Robert Antelme’s, The Human Race, specifically, the difficulty of presenting such an experience as well his ethical affirmation of the integrity of humanity despite the atrocities. Finally, interspersed throughout the work and acting as a kind of anchor, Kofman analyzes Blanchot’s work, his interpretation of Antelme and his story, "The Idyll." Kofman’s exploration of the Holocaust and of the relationships and tension among autobiographical, historical, and philosophical approaches to writing about the holocaust is an important and highly original work.