Veils
by Helene Cixous
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Something of a historical event, this book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," 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 savoir (to know) and voir (to see). Jacques show more Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" complexly muses on a host of autobiographical, philosophical, and religious motifs--including his varied responses to "Savoir." The two texts are accompanied by six beautiful and evocative drawings that play on the theme of drapery over portions of the body. Veils suspends sexual difference between two homonyms: la voile (sail) and le voile (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. 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 imminence 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 "verdict" whose threatening secret remains out of reach by our knowledge. show lessTags
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140+ Works 2,410 Members
Born in 1937 in Algeria, Helene Cixous came to Paris, where she is currently professor of English, in 1955. After a dissertation on James Joyce, The Exile of James Joyce (1968), she began to publish novels, critical essays, and plays, most notably Le Portrait de Dora (1976), a feminist retelling of a Freudian case history. Jacques Derrida has show more named Helene Cixous the greatest contemporary French writer. Cixous has been an active participant in the development of literary criticism after structuralism and has been a leading figure in the French feminist movement. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Veils
- Original title
- Voiles
Classifications
- Genres
- Fiction and Literature, Literature Studies and Criticism
- DDC/MDS
- 848.91409 — Literature & rhetoric French Literature French miscellaneous writings 1900- 1900-1999 1945-1999 Individual authors
- LCC
- PQ2663 .I9 .V6513 — Language and Literature French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese literatures French literature Modern literature 1961-2000
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 66
- Popularity
- 473,464
- Rating
- (3.67)
- Languages
- English, French
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 2
