Something of a historical event, this book combines loosely autobiographical texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. Savoir, by HZl 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 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.