Kofman's Affirmative Creation: Moral Law, Dom Juan and the Limits of Maternal Debt

This article considers Sarah Kofman's interpretation of Molière's Dom Juan in ‘The art of not paying one's debts’. It argues that this neglected text addresses important questions of moral debt and that Dom Juan's failure to reject all debt is of central importance. Building on this, the article shows how Kofman proposes a form of affirmative creation which involves the rejection of a sexual economy shared by Kant, Freud and Dom Juan. It then turns to Nietzsche to explain this failure: we see that Dom Juan's insistence on the maternal in fact limits the self-creation that he desires. The article argues that Kofman understands the maternal as a limit on our capacity for creating a more just moral law. The case of Dom Juan, therefore, allows us to see that Kofman's affirmative creation involves the creation of new categories beyond the maternal and paternal.