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Kofman, Sarah. 2007. Selected Writings. Ed.Thomas Albrecht. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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The range and variety of Sarah Kofman's thought are suggested by the five-part division in Thomas Albrecht's excellent new edition of the Selected Writings: papers on Freud, on Nietzsche, on women in philosophy, on painting, and on Judaism and anti-Semitism. For some time I have been struck by Kofman's wonderful facility as a critical reader, which she describes--in this case apropos of her reading of Freud--as "a symptomal reading of his text, making it say something more or other than what it says literally, yet basing the reading on the literal sense alone" (Kofman 2007, 37). Although those words aren't explicitly offered as a universal or philosophical method of reading, they do have a resonance, it seems to me, beyond their immediate context of reading Freud. Making a text say something more or other than what it says literally while at the same time basing that reading on the literal sense alone is what Kofman does repeatedly and brilliantly. Although her principal writing about Socrates isn't included in the Selected Writings, we can profitably approach her book on Socrates with those words in mind.

Sarah Kofman's Socrate(s), which is a fascinating but somewhat neglected text, was published in 1989, followed by an English translation by Catherine Porter under the title Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher (Kofman 1998). Following a brief introductory section where Kofman discusses Plato's Symposium, which already registers some of the themes that appear later in her book, she goes on to explore the fictions of Socrates produced by Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. In her final section, which she calls "Three Socratic Novels," she argues that each of these later philosophers "is trying as best he can to 'settle' his own 'case', to carry out his reading in such a way that all of his own certitudes will not collapse with Socrates, that his own equilibrium and that of his 'system' ... will not be too seriously threatened" (1998, 248). In other words their Socrates(es) are projections of the novelis-tic mediators themselves and tell us more about them than about him. Throughout her book, Kofman puts the reader in the position of wanting to ask--needing to ask--"But is there any truth about Socrates that we are...

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