Kofman began her teaching career in Toulouse in 1960 at the Lycée Saint-Sernin, and worked with both Jean Hyppolite and Gilles Deleuze.

Her abandoned primary thesis (thèse principale) for her State doctorate, later published as Nietzsche et la métaphore, was supervised by Deleuze.

Paroles suffoquées (1987) is dedicated to the memory of her father, rabbi Bereck Kofman, whom she saw for the last time on 16 July 1942, and who was killed at Auschwitz.

[4] After her death, Jacques Derrida wrote the following: For she too was without pity, if not without mercy, in the end, for both Nietzsche and Freud, whom she knew and whose bodies of work she had read inside and out.

She loved them pitilessly, and was implacable towards them (not to mention a few others) at the very moment when, giving them without mercy all that she could, and all that she had, she was inheriting from them and was keeping watch over what they had—what they still have—to tell us, especially regarding art and laughter.