CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/23/2025

Courageous and inherently original, 'Claude Cahun: Cancelled Confessions' is back in print!

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.