Veils

Something of a historical event, this book combines loosely &quot;autobiographical&quot; texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. &quot;Savoir,&quot; by Hélène Cixous, is a brief but densely layered account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia, an experience that ends with the unexpected turn of grieving for what is lost. Her literary inventiveness mines the coincidence in French between the two verbs <i>savoir</i> (to know) and <i>voir</i> (to see). Jacques Derrida's &quot;A Silkworm of One's Own&quot; complexly muses on a host of autobiographical, philosophical, and religious motifs—including his varied responses to &quot;Savoir.&quot; The two texts are accompanied by six beautiful and evocative drawings that play on the theme of drapery over portions of the body.<br> <br> <i>Veils</i> suspends sexual difference between two homonyms: <i>la voile</i> (sail) and <i>le voile</i> (veil). A whole history of sexual difference is enveloped, sometimes dissimulated here—in the folds of sails and veils and in the turns, journeys, and returns of their metaphors and metonymies.<br> <br> However foreign to each other they may appear, however autonomous they may be, the two texts participate in a common genre: autobiography, confession, memoirs. The future also enters in: by opening to each other, the two discourses confide what is about to happen, the <i>imminence</i> of an event lacking any common measure with them or with anything else, an operation that restores sight and plunges into mourning the knowledge of the previous night, a &quot;verdict&quot; whose threatening secret remains out of reach by our knowledge.<br> <br>