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 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.
