Ecritures et déchirures félines. L'écriture du chat Murr (d'Hoffmann) selon Autobiogriffures de Sarah Kofman

In Autobiogriffures (1976), Sarah Kofman follows the paws and traces of the cat who, in 1820, had crossed, scratched, pasticked, and written the famous pages of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Tomcat Murr. Through a completely original philosophical operation – and undoubtedly a forerunner of what would later be Derrida’s attempt to deconstruct the so-called “animal question” – Sarah Kofman tracks the temptations and shadows, the postures and narcissisms of man – scholars and writers above all – who has always imposed and exercised his rational superiority over the instinctive and (supposedly) inferior animal world. Letting herself be carried away by the subversive and clawed writing of the feline writer, towards the “marginal states” of human knowledge – between wakefulness and dream, reason and instinct, philosophy and poetry – Kofman rewrites, in an unprecedented and equally subversive way, the intertwining that weaves together (auto)biography, literature, writing, and philosophy, thus challenging the all-too-human primacy of logos and graphè.