Sarah Kofman was a French philosopher, essayist, and professor at the Sorbonne associated with the deconstructionist movement, who worked closely with Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Yet in spite of her impressive academic output, which spanned philosophy, art, psychoanalysis, literature and feminism, she never gained her rightful place among the greatest names in world philosophy.

Analyzing the works of renowned philosophers in search of what had been repressed, Kofman would joke that her biography was in fact a bibliography. Nonetheless, her work was pioneering in that it introduced a female perspective into the great, male-centric philosophical systems.

Kofman wrote many books and countless articles, but it was only at the end of her life that she dared tell her own story. She described her childhood, which had been “stretched” between two streets and two mothers: her Jewish biological mother, and her adopted mother – the Frenchwoman who had hidden her during the war. This symbolic “circling” between rue Ordener, associated with her Jewish identity, and rue Labat, identified with the process of assimilation, became a source of inner conflict and an identity crisis. As a mature philosopher, Kofman was able to provide a detached account of her wartime experience. The fabricated identity she had assumed for years not only let her survive the war, but also encouraged reflection on the inmost parts of her self.

Self-creation, considered both as a theme in art and as a mechanism of social change, is key to understanding the conditions of a post-media society and provides a space in which to analyze that which is overt and that which is hidden. Perhaps that is what Kofman was intimating in her last essay, La mort conjurée (Notes on The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632), where she implies that acquired modes of seeing in art distract us from the genuinely painful by demanding that we focus on the arbitrary and more palatable. Apparent mechanisms of disclosing might in fact function as involuntary strategies of concealment. Looking at Kofman's personal history, we should ask ourselves: What are we looking at, and whom do we actually see?

I've been taking detours all my life,
I spend money on taxis
I have them give rue Ordener i rue Labat
a wide berth,
and especially rue Marcadet, which connects the two,
that one's the worst.
Do you hear what I hear: Mar-cadet, night-mare?
It's no coincidence that those streets
have that syllable between them. Listen:
MAR-cadet, night-MARE! That's why,
for decades now, I've been avoiding
rue Ordener and rue Labat,
I've been paying extra to take those detours my whole life.
I'm done with that.
— Janusz Margański, Monika Muskała (from the screenplay)