An Unhappy Love Is a True Love When Truth Is Also Artifice: Claude Cahun’s Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals)

Although Nazi Germany had dreams of invading and conquering England, the closest it ever got was occupying the Channel Islands, a collection of small archipelagos in the English Channel that are closer to the French mainland near Normandy than they are to the English coast. Not officially part of the United Kingdom, they are nevertheless Crown Dependencies and overseen by England since the fourteenth century. Perhaps historically known as a favorite destination of English and French royalists, tax evaders, as well as political exiles such as Victor Hugo, the largest of the Channel Islands is Jersey, which in 1939 had more than fifty thousand inhabitants. At the beginning of World War II, Nazi Germany’s military made elaborate plans to invade the Channel Islands, including the coordination of air, sea, and land forces, but England had left them undefended, and after the bombing of a few ports and relatively minimal casualties, the territory was quickly conquered at the end of June 1940, with Jersey officially falling under Nazi rule on July 1.

Nazi Germany had plans to establish a formidable Atlantic Wall stretching from Scandinavia to France and down to General Francisco Franco’s Spain. Fortifications consisted of towers, casements, pillboxes, batteries, bunkers, tunnels, modified ports, and more. Special emphasis was placed on the Channel Islands because to the German leadership they represented occupied English soil, and as a result they became among the most fully fortified parts of the entire Atlantic Wall, with elaborate constructions that exist to the present day. Prisoners of war along with conscripted and captured civilians from Europe, Russia, and North Africa worked as forced and slave labor building the Atlantic Wall all along the North Atlantic coast to protect it from an invasion by England and the United States. Initial work, however, involved the installment of massive artillery guns that could attack British shipping and warships in the English Channel and bombard the coast at Dover, which they did in September 1940. But after these first offensive forays in preparation for invasion, the Atlantic Wall was reconceived as a defensive formation.

The French writers, artists, stepsisters, partners, and lovers Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore observed this Nazi occupation and construction project from their house on the Isle of Jersey, where they had moved from Paris in 1937 hoping to escape political turmoil and swelling anti-Semitism in the years leading up to World War II. Cahun, who was Jewish, was born Lucy Schwob in 1894 to a prominent literary family, and Moore was born Suzanne Malherbe in 1892. Teenage friends and possibly intimates before their respectively widowed parents married each other and they became stepsisters, they adopted their gender-fluid pseudonyms before arriving in Paris circa 1920. This use of pseudonyms would be among the first of many performances of self and identity for which Cahun and Moore would become recognized before being forgotten after their deaths and then attract attention again in the 1990s for their groundbreaking approach to photographic portraiture and montage. They were also equally inventive, as well as prolific, in their production and distribution of anti-Nazi propaganda on Jersey during World War II.

In Paris, Cahun and Moore participated in literary scenes that ranged from surrealism to the modernist lesbian writers around Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, and Sylvia Beach, founder of Shakespeare and Company bookstore and first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Cahun and Moore hosted their own literary salon that in the 1930s became more politically focused. They also participated in avant-garde theater by acting and designing costumes and stage sets, which they used in their unconventional photographic self-portraits. During the course of her life before, during, and after Paris, Cahun made hundreds of photographs of herself, other people, landscapes, and still lifes of both natural and artificially arranged objects. She is now best known for stylized self-portraits in which she switches, confuses, and neutralizes gender, especially conventional female gender, although she also made images of this too, which if anything sharpens her critique in showing—anticipating Judith Butler—how much gender is a performance even when, and in fact usually, an unwitting one. But more than performing gender, Cahun subverts it; and her life and art—both photography and writing—can be seen as a systematic assault on traditional values. For Cahun, this is first and foremost the idea of the self as formulated by Western European bourgeois society.

Most commentators, although not all, consider Cahun’s self-portraits to be collaborations with Moore, which is more obvious with some photographs than with others. In any case, Cahun is invariably the subject, although one of her most reproduced self-portraits, in which her hair is cropped short and dyed blond and her face is reflected in profile in a mirror while wearing a checkered jacket, finds its echo—its mirrored mirror—in one of Moore wearing a white beanie with a blue stripe reflected in the same mirror. Less interested in individuation, Cahun believed in proliferation: of subjectivities, genders, values, and perspectives. She resisted hardened categories of all sorts, whether of the self, the conceptual, or the political; and her most important writing and art are similarly unclassifiable, which is partly why cultural history lost track of her and Moore until portrait-based photography became revalued in the art world and new understandings of subjectivity formulated by queer theory created a context for the reception of her work, even as Cahun pushes at the edges of this too.

In other words, Cahun’s critique is directed as much at Western conceptions of the self as it is at gender because the self is an intersectional product. For Cahun, the self is fundamentally intersubjective, and agency is contextually dependent. Cahun articulates in her images and texts how the struggle of this self to assert itself constantly ends in failure, or else failure is where it establishes itself, which in either case destabilizes the constraints, expectations, demands, and normalizations imposed on it. In her writing and photographs, Cahun revels in this failure because it is freeing and liberatory from conventional reality and the values encrusted within it. Creativity and artificiality are fully embraced, just as they were for one of Cahun’s heroes, Oscar Wilde, whom Cahun honored by briefly publishing work in the 1910s as Daniel Douglas, taking Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, as a pseudonym. An “unnatural”—or, more precisely, de-naturalizing—love that destroys is for Cahun the truest love of all because truth is an artificial construction, and the inherited self as interpellated subject is to be overthrown.

“Nothing is more hypocritical than the truth,” Cahun writes in Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals), published by Siglio in an edition that corrects typos and two upside-down photomontages included in the groundbreaking English translation from MIT Press in 2008 titled Disavowals, or Cancelled Confessions.1 The Siglio version also more closely reproduces the original graphic design of Aveux non Avenus, including its front and back covers, as well as the individual stars, eyes, and lips that separate subsections within the book’s nine parts. Both the MIT Press and Siglio versions are translated by Susan de Muth, who published an edition in England in 2024 via her imprint, Thin Man Press. The original version was published partly as an artist’s book in 1930 in an edition of five hundred copies by Éditions du Carrefour, which specialized in works by Dadaists and surrealists (including the first two volumes of Max Ernst’s collage-novel trilogy), but this limited and specialized print run was also partly responsible for the text’s almost immediate disappearance for more than fifty years. Sylvia Beach’s partner, Adrienne Monnier, initially suggested that Cahun write a memoir, and then rejected it for publication, as did Gallimard for it being of “an indeterminate genre,” a phrase that Cahun then incorporated into the text followed by a paragraph-long anti-commercialism screed.

A mirror is not a self, as Narcissus fatally learned. Neither is a self-portrait, as Cahun shows in her photographic and writerly versions. And a confession isn’t a self either, as the very title of Cahun’s work indicates: Aveux (avowals) non Avenus (null or voided). But they aren’t voided because they aren’t true; they are voided because truth is socially constructed and frequently imposed, and Cahun seeks to undermine ossified and repressive social constructs wherever and however possible, whether via text, image, performance, fashion, etc. Specifically, Cahun sought to confront the social constructs of French bourgeois, Catholic, patriarchal culture. In this sense, her work advances a French avant-garde literary and artistic tradition stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century while providing a much necessary queering of its generally heterosexual, and sometimes sexist and homophobic, orientation. And like that tradition, shocking the bourgeoisie and subverting the motifs and thematics of Christianity are major parts of Cahun’s repertoire. In its obsession with God, angels, virtue, and sin, Cancelled Confessions is a heretical text, but the openings it seeks to create are more than only rebellions; they are spaces of becoming.

Cancelled Confessions may open with a crush on a “he” (or male-identifying figure) and end with a death or suicide, but it follows no narrative or even chronology. Its nine sections plus brief introduction are separated with elaborate photomontages, epigraphs, and initials or acronyms—some more mysterious (“C.M.C.”) than others (“I.O.U”). This anti-memoir memoir consists of extended sections of letters, notes, aphorisms, poems, theatrical scripts, short narratives, fables, dreams, and dialogues, nearly all of which are rarely sustained for more than a few pages. Genders are confused, pronouns are switched, the subject of address isn’t always clear, and the writing plays with the feminine and masculine genders of French nouns. Cahun’s speaker/I transforms her crush into the male Greek statue Auriga, who is then turned into the female character Aurige; on the next page, the soul becomes a piece of fabric, which can be made into a dress or curtain. Everything in Cancelled Confessions is in this condition of ongoing metamorphosis: “There are as many ways of being as there are stars” (125). Yet even these ways of being are unstable in the endless shape-shifting that occurs in Cahun’s art. The text itself is a proliferation of forms just as Cahun’s photographic self-portraits, montages, and assemblages feature unexpected recombinations.

Yet far from being an avant-garde experiment, Cahun is in fact illuminating how the subject functions with its continually shifting—and conflating—of I and you, its performing different roles based on the relationship and situation, and its shuttling back and forth along a spectrum of genders. Cahun’s text may be nonnarrative, disjunctive, elusive, and at times willfully opaque, but that does not necessarily make it less realistic. Nineteenth-century Sigmund Freud already understood the subject to be unstable, riven with contradictions, and tenuously held together with illusions; conversely, for all of their interests in irrational thought, dreamwork, and convulsive beauty, the surrealist subject remained relatively coherent, its perspective mainly intact, as seen, for example, in André Breton’s novel Nadja, published two years before Aveux non Avenus and similarly incorporating images alongside text. For Cahun, the other is not something to be discovered on a walk but inseparable from any sense of self, a self—echoing Arthur Rimbaud—that is an other as well. Cahun’s more radical experiments in photographic self-portraiture in collaboration with Moore also displace their subject, sometimes with costume and dress, other times with mirrors, superimpositions, and multiple exposures.

Cancelled Confessions most literally starts with invisibility. Following the dates 1919–25 and a first collage featuring a single eye magnified through a glass globe and signed “Moore” at the bottom, the opening line is: “The invisible adventure.” For Cahun, invisibility is less a disappearance and more a refusal of assimilation, first and foremost into a heterosexual order, and an escape from homogeneity of all sorts. This flexibility and indeterminacy are deeply threatening to hegemonic ideologies that seek to fix, frame, and absorb subjects into their hierarchical and inequitable structures. Knowledge as a form of power locates and categorizes, and in the regime of hyper-capitalism, every location and category is potentially, or already, monetized. As part of her response to being accused of writing in “an indeterminate genre,” Cahun responds: “But faced with unlabeled products, they become completely disorientated … A sticker is obligatory” (145). This sticker is simultaneously a description, a container, and a price tag. Cahun’s work anticipates the self transformed into a commodity and subjectivity being made synonymous with entrepreneurship, especially within digital economies. In a world in which how the subject is seen and by whom has become a crucial concern on all parts of the sociopolitical continuum, Cahun was already trying to elude the commercial-surveillance-identity net, which one hundred years later is becoming increasingly ubiquitous.

Misrepresentation in the quest for new and different sets of values extends to the formal techniques of Cahun’s prose and photographs. Bodies are fragmented into parts and objects that substitute for each other. Female becomes male, and male becomes female (and human becomes insect) until the categories are inherently unstable: “Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. If it existed in our language, no one would be able to see my thought’s vacillations. I’d be a worker bee for good” (171). Goodness eludes conventional language and its modes of representation, which is why Cancelled Confessions aims to be so transgressive. But first it must loosen itself from heterosexual love, and perhaps from love itself, and then from the self, and it does so because of the way they are each and together imbricated within the dominant, oppressive order: “I’d sooner suck a bee’s sting than give in” (129). As the 1930s in Europe progressed, Cahun became more explicitly political and in 1932 joined the Communist Party–affiliated Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires (Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists); in 1935, she helped form with Breton and Georges Bataille the radical anti-fascist (and anti-Stalinist) group Contre-Attaque, while arguing in prose manifestos against the imposed mandates of socialist realism emanating outward from the Soviet Union into Europe and the United States.

But in the 1920s, when Cahun is writing her anti-memoir and participating in Paris avant-garde theater, her targets are assimilation and conformity. The mythological figure of Narcissus features in the opening sections of Cancelled Confessions, as do self-portraits in the photomontages introducing the first three sections (section II is entitled “Myself [for want of anything better]”). But for all of Narcissus’s self-absorption, it is only a reflection he can know, just as Cahun’s face is mirrored and refracted throughout her collages, and language mediates her personal expression until speaker and spoken are blurred. Cahun’s “confessions” are not cancelled after the fact; they are disavowed in—and even by—the very process of being articulated. Cahun’s project might involve an element of self-fashioning, but she is astute enough to understand that fashion is ephemeral and performative. As in Wilde’s writings, the authentic is not so easily found and sincerity readily inverted, and like the other lodestar for Cancelled Confessions, Friedrich Nietzsche, truths have histories, not eternities. The text is filled with Nietzschean exhortations such as, “Courage! Attack my favorite values first, these are the most resilient” (138), and it at least twice urges moving “beyond good and evil” (158, 187). The focus on Narcissus and the ego is also a defiance of mass obedience, with the storm clouds of fascism beginning to gather on Europe’s horizon.

The middle parts of Cancelled Confessions contain multiple dialogues among imaginary characters that might loosely be affiliated with freedom, control, and order. Most of these figures are in varying degrees of romantic and erotic relations with each other, and their genders are less significant than their interconnections. One seems to be both a man and a woman. After the dissatisfaction with the self and its representations formulated in the first three sections, Cahun now focuses on the difficulty of relationships with the other, and in particular an intimate other, although all others in Cancelled Confessions seem to be intimates in some way. There is a danger in hoping to read Cahun’s anti-memoir autobiographically when one of its fundamental goals is to elude conventional modes of representation, whether personal or aesthetic, with “the esoteric qualities of the noun before the alarming frankness of the verb” (106). This frankness manifested itself in Cahun’s art and life in a restless movement between genders, genres, mediums, artistic communities, locations, politics, and names (Cahun and Moore returned to their birth names when they moved to Jersey in 1937). At times, Cahun frames as a failure this inability to settle and to profit from a position, but failure and defeat are the routes to possibility, and perhaps more than anything else, possibility is what Cancelled Confessions doesn’t so much argue for as attempt to manifest in both its form and content. Its refusal to construct a solid edifice is a response to coagulating classifications of gender and ethnicity, especially the ones—patriarchal and anti-Semitic—formulated by Europe’s rapidly rising and consolidating right.

In the decade of its composition and rejection by publishers during the 1920s, Cahun rewrote and edited her anti-memoir, as well as created the photomontages for it. In the book’s closing sections, the dialogues have mostly disappeared and the writing moves into a Nietzschean aphoristic mode as the self confronts its worst enemy: itself (which Freud knew so well). For both psychoanalysis and surrealism, destructive internalized values are potentially dislodged in this confrontation; Cahun’s response is more circumspect: “Does the world have to be badly made for a being who is odd, but sexually sociable, to be forced to take refuge in crime as if it were a convent, not only to live in it, but even to create some new values there!” (164). However, in typical (self-)cancelling fashion, she follows: “But what kind of crime? … What does it matter! A dead end” (164). The new values, not the crime, are what is important, although transgression is necessary to reach them. For Cahun, to subvert the self is simultaneously to criticize the society that produces the subject and the power dynamics that activate and sustain it. Cahun’s speaker is always threatening a retreat from these structures—into narcissism, into poetry, into crime—but is too entangled with others to ever be fully extricated. Instead, the process is one of ongoing metamorphosis accompanied by a frustration with larger social change. Cahun’s speaker is frequently unhappy and dissatisfied, almost to the point of despair, but this dissatisfaction might also be understood as a form of hope.

“I have spent thirty-three years of my life wishing passionately, blindly, that things would be other than they are. I’ve acquired little more than fictional values. I don’t know what bill is due today. But I can feel it,” Cahun writes at the beginning of a final, short section added in 1928 after completing the bulk of the book from 1919 to 1925 (226). In the late 1920s, Cahun had already shifted her attention from writing to photography, which she had first explored in the mid-1910s before moving to Paris. And it is her photographs that rescued her from the silence of history after they began to be exhibited in the 1980s and ’90s, even if during her lifetime only one photograph by Cahun was ever published. Yet for decades she experimented with different approaches in varying degrees of collaboration with Moore, producing more than five hundred images. Along with self-portraits, these include photographs of writer and artist friends, assembled objects, and more. Cahun didn’t arrange them into categories or treat them as art objects, and they were only rediscovered by accident on the Isle of Jersey in the early 1970s during a sale of part of Moore’s estate.

Her most staged, stylized, and gender-playful photographs were taken from 1927 to 1929, which was also when Cahun and Moore were involved in Parisian avant-garde theater. These self-portraits include a series in which Cahun holds fake barbells and poses with short hair, hearts drawn on her cheeks, pursed and painted lips, false eyelashes, while wearing a white shirt on which the phrase “I AM IN TRAINING. DONT [sic] KISS ME” is written in English between fake nipples attached to her shirt. In another series, she sits cross-legged in a Buddhist pose with an affixed bindi or third eye while wearing strings of long beads and a skullcap. Another photo obscures Cahun’s whole face with a female mask and her body with a black cloak covered in white and black eye masks. The single image Que me veux tu? (What do you want from me?) (1929) superimposes two photographs of Cahun’s nearly shaved head and thin neck and shoulders in a way that uncannily—and frighteningly—echoes pictures from liberated concentration camps a decade-and-a-half later. The title’s question, as with so much of the writing in Cancelled Confessions, would seem to be directed as much toward the self as to an other, and the photograph’s composition echoes this. In Cancelled Confessions she writes: “Life’s role is to leave me uncompleted, allow me only freeze-frames,” and the approximately five hundred photographs that Cahun and Moore took over the course of more than four decades are a literal embodiment of this (228).

The photos for which Cahun is most famous intentionally confuse gender categories as well as what might be human, a category that in Western Europe was formulated during the early modern era with its roots in slavery and colonial encounters alongside the initial stirrings of a capitalist bourgeoisie; within this context, “the human” became equated with propertied, white, European males, and the rest of the globe organized accordingly. Cahun’s photographs are an envisioning of other potentialities, and the fact that she never seemed particularly interested in technical proficiency, had photo labs make her prints, and used the same camera given to her as a teenager indicate that she—and Moore—were more engaged by the conception and staging of these images, and in process over product. Usually printed at five by seven inches and smaller, they almost resemble Polaroids or even model test shots. Cahun didn’t stick with any single photographic series for very long, just as she regularly switched communities and artistic disciplines. This restlessness is written onto nearly every page of Cancelled Confessions, both in form and content. And it shows in the ten photomontages she made to separate the nine sections and introduction. A cross between surrealism’s sensual juxtapositions and Hannah Höch’s more severe Dadaist collages, Cahun’s montages, only one of which survives (the first one, signed by Moore), dismantle and suture her own and other bodies, whether human and animal, animate and inanimate.

Cahun carried this approach into another set of groundbreaking photographs made in 1936 after a few years of participating in the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires and Contre-Attaque. These more than fifty images feature a variety of unrelated objects assembled by Cahun indoors and outdoors to create small tableaux that are one version of the surrealist artistic mandate adopted from the Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror from 1869: “the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.”2 Instead, Cahun used peacock feathers, a fake butterfly, glass eyes, a watch face, teeth, and a miniature gnome to make a “portrait” of Breton, which consists of a doll head, a mask, a small artist mannequin, a key, foliage, a little star, and more arranged under a bell jar. On a crocheted white tablecloth, an egg with protruding baby’s-breath flowers rests next to a spoon, a small hourglass, a spindly plant, and a glass bowl of dark, round objects. These photographed assemblages were produced the year before Cahun and Moore decided to leave Paris for the Isle of Jersey, with fascism firmly entrenched across Europe. Cahun had visited Jersey with her family as a child, and she and Moore vacationed there as adults. They also both died there: Cahun in 1954 from a kidney tumor while in the midst of planning a move back to Paris, and Moore from an overdose of sedatives in 1972.

Fascism seeks to make visible. Torchlight spectacles and cathedrals of light are festivals of illumination. Fundamentally against otherness, fascism wants everything discernable, the better to decide and distinguish what does not conform to the strict social organization of its ethno-nationalism. Fascism arrives when policies are no longer deliberated by elected representatives, and when security forces operate in broad daylight. In Europe during Cahun’s time, the others of fascism were primarily communists and Jews, which in turn were frequently conflated, but the Nazis also sought to eradicate the disabled, the Romani, and homosexuals. Cahun’s writing and art are acts of transmutation as a form of subterfuge and invisibility, partly as anti-fascist and against the workings of power in general, and partly as the creation of new and alternative subjectivities. Cahun strained against conventional ideas of the subject, and certainly against the notion of the individual, to rethink concepts and processes of relation. Cahun’s engagement with invisibility and visibility, masking and exposure, imaginative writing, radical politics, avant-garde theater, personas, montage, and design culminated in her and Moore’s production of anti-Nazi propaganda on the Isle of Jersey during World War II, after they refused to evacuate with thousands of other residents when it became clear that Germany would invade.

As she wrote after the war in an unpublished remembrance that might also partly describe her approach in Cancelled Confessions: “We fought for a rainbow of values stretching from the ultraromantic black to the flaming red. We fought for the Germans against Nazi Germany. We fought as Surrealist writers with weapons of chance.”3 After the war, Cahun claimed that she and Moore produced more than two thousand pieces of anti-Nazi resistance, and when they were finally caught in the summer of 1944, the Nazi authorities had collected at least 350 of them as evidence when they brought Cahun and Moore to trial that fall and sentenced them to death, a sentenced commuted a few months later. Like the elusive subject and identity of Cancelled Confessions, many of these pieces were signed “The Soldier with No Name” (Der Soldat ohne Namen) to give the illusion that they were being produced by a disgruntled German soldier. Moreover, Cahun and Moore—or Schwob and Malherbe, as they were known on the island—created their propaganda in such a way that would make it seem as if it was being fabricated by multiple Nazi apostates. Moore’s fluency in German made the project all that more convincing and was part of a lifetime of her helping Cahun translate her radical ideas into reality.

Performing normality, Cahun and Moore would walk around during the day and night or take the bus to various parts of the island to distribute their anti-Nazi propaganda. These included typed and handwritten pamphlets, posters, photomontages, a fake newspaper, jokes, translated BBC reports, drawings, cartoons, poems, and more urging German soldiers to disobey and desert. They détourned the text and images of German magazines and slipped them back into circulation. No genre or medium was off limits. Fake crosses were put in a German cemetery, and a large banner installed above a church altar. Slogans were etched into coins and written on paper currency. Their approach was not ominous threats but rather an attempt to reach those soldiers with doubts about Hitler or the war, and judging from the ones Cahun and Moore later met during their imprisonment, their anti-war campaign seems to have had a degree of success. Cahun was bold enough to slip notes into the pockets of soldiers or leave them at their houses, but the majority were left in the open. Some were placed in packs of cigarettes. Cahun and Moore used cigarette rolling paper to write many of their notes and slogans, and they suspected it was the woman who sold them the papers who eventually betrayed them to the Nazis in charge, who at first had trouble believing that this widespread resistance campaign was conducted by two middle-aged, middle-class women.

In a later self-portrait from May 1945, the month she and Moore were freed from prison and Jersey liberated, Cahun stands with her hands in her pants pockets while wearing a pale trenchcoat, a scarf over her hair, and clenching a Nazi eagle insignia between her front teeth. She and Moore had survived two world wars, fascism, anti-Semitism, suicide attempts, and a death sentence, and this was a rare moment of triumph in her work that otherwise sought to undermine the hierarchies and exclusions embedded in the very idea of victory. To rest in achievement was anathema to Cahun’s disposition, which is partly why she disappeared from history: “Here am I, innocent, a jobless virgin, a queen on strike, voluntarily unemployed, marginalized and as they say, outlawed from society” (194). But her artistic breakthroughs and freedoms continue to be rediscovered, including the addition of Cancelled Confessions to the important works of literary modernism as well as its relevance to twenty-first-century reimaginings of the self and its complex and fluid interrelations with others.