Anne in the drawing represent a collection of Leonardo’s maternal figures . In the cartoon, Saint Anne and Mary both caress the Christ child, who is playing with Saint John the Baptist. For Freud, these two figures have a double significance. First, they represent Leonardo’s father’s second wife, Donna Albicia, and his paternal grandmother, Mona Lucia. Freud hypothesizes that Saint Anne also represents Leonardo’s “‘vraie et première’” [“‘earlier and true’” ] mother, Caterina, who was forced to give him up to his father and new wife. Most of Kofman’s memoir struggles with the problem of having two mothers. The name “mémé” means “granny” in French, obscuring mémé’s role as a mother replacement just as in Leonardo’s cartoon.8 The cartoon and Freud’s analysis show how difficult it is to even imagine having two mothers. Leonardo uses Saint Anne/Mona Lucia as a screen for the first and true mother, who must remain unmentioned. Kofman never explicitly mentions the relationship between her own situation and Freud’s interpretation of the “Carton de Londres,” yet it does not take an especially subtle reader to see how a story of a rivalry between mothers, and of a mother hidden in plain sight, resonates with Kofman’s own.Leonardo is the object of desire of two women, 4×8 botanicare tray his biological mother and his stepmother. Freud imagines that Leonardo cruelly chases his mother from his heart to make room for the young and beautiful newcomer, as Kofman does in her own story.
That Leonardo’s stepmother is noble brings us back to “Family Romances”: like Kofman, Leonardo has savored the pleasure and the misery of having a childish fantasy come true. Nowhere in Rue Ordener Rue Labat does Kofman reckon with her mother’s feelings of abandonment, nor with her own possible feelings of guilt. It is here that she comes closest, allowing Freud’s reflections on Leonardo to speak for her mother’s anguish. In this chapter, Kofman’s intertextual escape from her own story paradoxically brings her, and the reader, deeper inside that story to thoughts and feelings that are not expressed in her firstperson narrative. If in “Family Romances,” narrative creates a route for a child to enter the public world, here Kofman creates an intertextual path that leads to the public world, but which then leads the reader back to the private world. While Kofman employs intertext in Chapter 18 to obliquely consider her mother’s pain, she employs it in Chapter 19 to communicate her own anguish when she is ripped away from mémé as well as how the horror of that experience symbolizes the horror and uncertainty of the war itself. In The Lady Vanishes, a kindly old woman is kidnapped by criminals and replaced with a nasty crone. The heroine, Iris, is the only person to notice the first woman’s disappearance and her replacement. They try to convince Iris she is hallucinating when she asks questions about what has happened. The film begins as a kind of hotel farce in a fictional Eastern European country, Bandrieka, complete with loud musicians, a room mixup with romantic consequences and drunken Englishmen.
The action then moves to a train that will take Iris, Miss Froy , Gilbert and a host of others back to England. The genre of the film changes to something more serious and sinister at this point. The humor of the hotel sequence is gone, replaced by dread and paranoia. By the end of the film, both the train and the action have gone off the rails as they hurtle towards an unknown destination. It becomes clear that what the other passengers had considered Iris’ paranoid delusions are quite real when soldiers from Bandrieka begin shooting at the passengers. The Lady Vanishes was released in 1938, at the eve of war with Germany and obliquely grapples with the question of whether to appease or engage with Germany. While Kofman’s discussion of The Lady Vanishes prepares the reader for the moment of her separation from mémé, the scene from the film does not form a perfect parallel to her experience. In the film, the original mother figure is the good and kind one, while “sa remplaçante” is “dur” and “faux”. In Kofman’s case, it is the opposite: her scowling mother is the original, her replacement kind and gentle. Kofman does not desire the recuperation of the original mother, as Iris does, but rather wishes to repress her in favor of the replacement. Mémé might be said to serve as a screen for Kofman’s original, ambivalent connection to her mother. Over the course of her memoir, Kofman’s mother changes from the most desired person in her life, for whom she risks deportation in her desire to be reunited, to a brutal harpy who starves her and wants to keep her from school. Kofman’s analysis of the film resonates not only with her desire for mémé, but also with the changes in her relationship with her mother. The final lines of Chapter 19 imply as much: “le mauvais sein à la place du bon sein, l’un parfaitement clivé de l’autre, l’un se transformant en l’autre” . [“The bad breast in place of the good one, the one utterly separate fro the other, the one changing into the other” ] Kofman is referring to the “good breast” and “bad breast” theorized by Melanie Klein.
When the mother has abundant milk for the child and welcomes him or her to her breast, the child experiences the “good breast”. When her breast is dry, or she refuses the child, or the child’s desire deserts him, she possesses the “bad breast” that the child would like to bite, to hurt, to devour, and the mother along with it. The good and bad breast belong to the same woman; they are the same breast. For the child, she seems to transform from one to the other, but this is only from the child’s immature point of view. What is “intolerable” for Kofman in the sentence quoted above is not just the nightmare of finding her own mother in place of mémé, but also the deeper horror that the loving mother of her earlier childhood is the same woman who subsequently tortures her. In a discussion of the “Le Carton de Londres” in L’Enfance de ‘art, Kofman makes reference to Freud’s observation that the Virgin and Saint Anne appear fused into a kind of two headed woman caressing the Christ child . This fusion is a good figure for the kind of confusion Kofman experiences between her good mother, her bad mother and mémé, as well as for the confusion children experience when they realize that the good and bad breast belong to the same woman. According to Klein, since children at this age think of themselves as omnipotent, a violent thought against the mother is also a violent action, flood tables for greenhouse and thus children experience deep guilt when they think they may have hurt or destroyed their mother. While Kofman does not address feelings of guilt in her narrative of her own childhood, she can approach them intertextually. These intertextual references are on one level escape routes out of Kofman’s own personal narrative, similar to the stories the children in Freud’s “Family Romances” use to escape from their family and destiny. One another level, like the twist in the Möbius strip, they also offer routes into Kofman’s more intimate thoughts and feelings. For Kofman, all writing is intertextual and therefore any writing has the potential to muddy the border between writer and text, private and public. She argues in “Ça cloche,” a commentary on Derrida’s Glas, that writing is helplessly citational, and thus the borders between one text and another are impossible to discern: “[les textes] parlent l’un dans la langue de l’autre . . . provoquant une sorte de débordement mettant à mal toutes les limites coupantes.” [[texts] speak one in the language of the other . . . Provoking a sort of overflowing that threatens all boundaries] Ann Smock combines this point with Kofman’s work in Autobiogriffures, a reading of Hoffman’s Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr. In Hoffman’s story, a “normal” autobiography is interleaved with the wild, boundary-erasing autobiography of a cat. Smock makes the point that it is not just the boundaries between texts that writing does away with, it also erases the boundary between author and text. Smock writes, “for all writing worth anything is barbed and feline and a menace: let it be as linear, as logocentric, as you like, Sarah Kofman says, and it is still sure to dispossess you; it has no respect for propriety or property” .
Texts are a zone without borders that can reach into the private space of the author and “dispossess” him or her. Similarly, Kofman’s trip between rue Ordener and rue Labat, and any trip she takes in her neighborhood as the supposed daughter of mémé, is through an ambiguous zone and threatens to rob her of her identity, or, more accurately, to remind her that she has no original and true identity at all. Her intertextual references merely dramatize the way in which all writing creates paths between what is personal and interior and what appears on the page, ultimately leading back from the public realm to the private. In that it muddies the distinction between self and other, the space created by writing in general, and intertext in particular, is a space of intersubjectivity. While loss of personal identity can be horrifying, in Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, Kofman also puts this loss to positive use. If her concern is to create a monument that is both personal and also open to the other, then the intersubjective space she creates in her text is a realm composed of both Kofman and her reader, a fragile point of intersection and communication. It is significant that what makes texts so “feline” and slippery is their citationality. Citations are expressions of context. Like the inhabitant of the publicprivate space of the neighborhood, a text does not exist all by itself in a vacuum. It exists in a world of other texts. This idea of context is key to Kofman’s philosophy as well as to her autobiography. She treats the philosophers she critiques as “sons of mothers”, not just as sexless thinkers sealed off from the rest of humanity . As sons of mothers, these philosophers have a genetic context, bodies, desires and a psychologically complicated relationship to women and sex. To pretend otherwise discounts the role of life and the body in the work of philosophy. And it is by looking at what philosophers have to say about women that Kofman is able to find the weak points in an otherwise seamless philosophy. It’s where the body of the philosopher—his context—intersects with his philosophy that the inconsistencies appear 9.In this passage, Kofman puts three words in quotation marks, marking them as citations and underscoring their odd double meanings. “<<Chez nous>>”: these are Kofman and her mother’s words from the past. They once used the term unthinkingly. Now, after the visit from the authorities, the words have taken on a layer of painful irony. In the next sentence, Kofman writes that they found their apartment “<<occupé>>”. This is the word of a bureaucrat informing them that they have no place to live, and thus it is in quotation marks. Yet in this context, just after the German occupation of the city, this word, is overlayed with an additional ironic meaning. The word “<<sinistrés>>,” meaning victims of a disaster or those who have been devastated, is another bureaucratic word, though the quotation marks also point to other potential meanings. It is from the Italian for “left” and carries with it connotations of secondariness, weakness, and, to an anglophone ear, evil. These words in quotation marks link together the citationality of the text and the citationality of the space of the city. Kofman is forced to use the words of others, with their attendant ironies, in her own text. And their old apartment helplessly welcomes its new occupier, “un médecin collaborateur” . [“a collaborationist doctor” ] Kofman’s text is simultaneously contextless and insistent on the role of context in any textual endeavor or experience of space.