Claude Cahun: Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals)
Introduction by Pierre Mac Orlan. Translation by Susan de Muth. Text by Amelia Groom. Illustrations by Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore.
Back in print after over a decade: the playful and genre-shattering memoir of a beloved surrealist known for her gender-bending portraiture
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. 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. 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 US 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, Cancelled Confessions is not only prescient, but urgent: “It is not enough to be vanquished, you also have to turn defeat to your advantage.” Born in France in 1894, Claude Cahun (née Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob) was a writer, artist and anti-fascist activist, associated with the Surrealists, yet who was 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 subversive, 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 the Isle of Jersey, Cahun created art—and a life—that aimed to disrupt societal, political and artistic orthodoxies with courage, wit and imagination.
ABOVE: Photomontage by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, originally published in 1930 in Aveux non Avenus, now translated by Susan de Muth as Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) by Claude Cahun, published by siglio in 2025. Image courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Trust.
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New from siglio, Claude Cahun: Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) is a book that defies all conventions—now, as it did in 1930, when it was first published by the French avant-garde publisher Éditions du Carrefour. Both a memoir in cypher form and an act of resistance in keeping with the author’s life as an under-the-radar queer Surrealist and (eventually) imprisoned anti-fascist revolutionary, it is published here in the legendary, out-of-print 2007 Tate/MIT Press English translation by Susan de Muth. A remarkable feat of independent publishing at the ever-shifting border between art, literature and activism, it is not just food for thought, but a feast. “As soon as I get to know them, each one a ferocious beast, they speak out against my most precious treasure,” Cahun concludes the volume. “Against the unique unnamable. Against my indefinable reason for being. Nonetheless, I allow them the advantage. But their thirst for prey cannot be appeased; their hunger for my flesh is insatiable. They don’t do this with the least nastiness. It’s just too strong for me.
I feel them come at speed. A gesture, a word, a nothing—mostly indirect—reveals me to them. They gorge themselves on my tears. They don’t leave me even with the wherewithal to suffer. I only have the heart to weep when I have fled from them. Dear Strangers, keep your distance: I have only you in the world.
‘And me? What about me?…’ someone shouts: myself.
My beautiful future, the unhoped for reserve, comes to me. Present already past, you who evade me, one moment more of respite…
Provided that it’s not too late.”
Photomontage by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, originally published in 1930 in Aveux non Avenus, now translated by Susan de Muth as Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals) by Claude Cahun, published by siglio in 2025. Image courtesy of the Jersey Heritage Trust.
FORMAT: Pbk, 6.75 x 8.75 in. / 272 pgs / 13 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $36.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $50 ISBN: 9781938221361 PUBLISHER: Siglio AVAILABLE: 10/28/2025 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Claude Cahun: Cancelled Confessions (or Disavowals)
Published by Siglio. Introduction by Pierre Mac Orlan. Translation by Susan de Muth. Text by Amelia Groom. Illustrations by Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore.
Back in print after over a decade: the playful and genre-shattering memoir of a beloved surrealist known for her gender-bending portraiture
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.
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.
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 US 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, Cancelled Confessions is not only prescient, but urgent: “It is not enough to be vanquished, you also have to turn defeat to your advantage.”
Born in France in 1894, Claude Cahun (née Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob) was a writer, artist and anti-fascist activist, associated with the Surrealists, yet who was 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 subversive, 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 the Isle of Jersey, Cahun created art—and a life—that aimed to disrupt societal, political and artistic orthodoxies with courage, wit and imagination.
