<DIV>Something of a historical event, this book combines loosely &#147;autobiographical&#8221; texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. &#147;Savoir,&#8221; by H&#233;l&#232;ne 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&#8217;s &#147;A Silkworm of One&#8217;s Own&#8221; complexly muses on a host of autobiographical, philosophical, and religious motifs&#151;including his varied responses to &#147;Savoir.&#8221; 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&#151;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 &#147;verdict&#8221; whose threatening secret remains out of reach by our knowledge.<BR><BR></div>