Sarah Kofman

Things are never beautiful by themselves but appear so to anyone who projects on to them his superabundance of life. But just as unconscious activity is unaware of itself as such, so man ‘forgets himself’ as the cause of these ‘beauties’ and imagines that the world itself is laden with them.

Sarah Kofman (14 September 1934 – 15 October 1994) was a French philosopher. She was the author of numerous books, including several on Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Her book, L'énigme de la femme: La femme dans les textes de Freud (1980), is perhaps the most thorough consideration of Freud's ideas concerning female sexuality.

Quotes

Nietzsche et la métaphore (1972)

English translation by D. Large Nietzsche and Metaphor (1983)

• A ‘good’ style is one which can communicate through signs a certain inner state symptomatic of a certain taste (such a communication presupposing a listener or reader with the same taste).
  • p. 2

• Dialectics and reflection play the same role for the philosopher as does verse for the poet.
  • p. 13

• The new philosopher does not put metaphor to rhetorical use but subordinates it … to the strategic objective of using non-stereotyped metaphors in order to unmask the metaphors which constitute every concept.
  • p. 18

• The philosopher does not just ‘play’ with metaphors: his play is of a ‘formidable seriousness’, for it is designed to oppose modernity’s hatred for art, to obliterate precisely the opposition between play and seriousness, dream and reality.
  • p. 18

• … the ‘pathos of distance’ which separates two types of life that have always already been in existence: the one flourishing and superabundant, projecting its own excess into things and embellishing them; the other degenerate, able only to impoverish the world by reducing it to the narrow and ugly measure of the concept, in order to spite itself and out of ressentiment toward life.
  • p. 20

• Things are never beautiful by themselves but appear so to anyone who projects on to them his superabundance of life. But just as unconscious activity is unaware of itself as such, so man ‘forgets himself’ as the cause of these ‘beauties’ and imagines that the world itself is laden with them.
  • p. 29