Claude Cahun: Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals)
“Cancelled Confessions is surrealist, trans, queer, auto-fiction, (anti)memoir, and also none of those things.”—McKenzie Wark, cultural critic
First published in 1930 by anti-fascist, avant-garde publisher Éditions du Carrefour in Paris as Aveux non Avenus, Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is Claude Cahun’s wildly radical answer to an invitation to write a memoir. Shattering the very premise of the “memoir”—the singularity of identity—into sharp and prismatic fragments, Cahun assembles an ever-mutating inquiry into the instability of “self” and its many masks.
"Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me."
Using a multitude of forms (fables, jokes, aphorisms, letters, dialogues, dreams, hymns, pronouncements, etc.), to plumb the subjects of desire, love, gender, sex, fear, faith, religion, and vanity (among others), Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is a tour-de-force work of resistance: it provokes the reader to enter the capacious, provocative, playful, and deeply imaginative space constructed by Cahun in defiance of all categorization, to repudiate a delimited, censured world and embrace, instead, the outcasts and cast-offs, the unknowable and the unknown.
"I believe, but in the conditional: I would like to believe."
Thoughtfully redesigned to emulate the original artist’s book, this revised edition of the out-of-print English translation by Susan de Muth—originally published in the UK by the Tate in 2007 and in the U.S. by MIT Press in 2008—includes novelist and critic Pierre Mac Orlan’s original 1930 preface along with contemporary essays by scholar Amelia Groom and translator de Muth. Almost 100-years-old, it is not only prescient, but urgent, in our own century.
"It’s not enough to be vanquished, you also have to know how to turn defeat to your advantage."
ISBN 978-1-938221-36-1 / 36 USD / PAPERBACK / 6.75x8.75 / 272 PGS+11 BW ILLUS. Translation by Susan de Muth. Preface by Pierre Mac Orlan. Essay by Amelia Groom.
Use code EFLUX for 20 percent off preorders (through September 25 only). Orders will ship at the end of September before the book is widely available in late October.
About Claude Cahun
Born in France in 1894, Claude Cahun (née Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob) was a writer, artist and anti-fascist activist, associated with the Surrealists, obscure for decades. Cahun’s shape-shifting, gender-bending, “self” portraits—made in collaboration with Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Malherbe, aka l’autre moi, “the other me”)—feature Cahun in androgynous garb with shaved head, or elaborately costumed and adorned with makeup or masks, often with mirrors or doubling, always multiplying the “I.” These are the most recognizable works in a highly subver-sive, multiform oeuvre that includes Aveux non Avenus (Cancelled Confessions) as well as more untranslated writings. Now embraced as a pioneer of queer and feminist expression and heralded for a daring and inventive, years-long resistance to the Nazi occupation of Isle of Jersey, Cahun created art—and a life—that aimed to disrupt societal, political and artistic orthodoxies with courage, wit and imagination.
siglio publishes uncommon books that live in the rich and varied space between art and literature. Driven by its feminist ethos, siglio champions uncategorizable, unwieldy, and expansive works by artists and writers who invite readers to see the world anew by reading word, image, and page in unfamiliar ways. For siglio, “the book” is many things, above all, a space for heterodoxy, ambiguity, wonder, and play.
