“From then on she did not know. She and Doubt were always inseparable: had things gone away or else was it she who mis-saw them? She never saw safely. Seeing was a tottering believing. Everything was perhaps.”

This is my ‘if you like this, you’ll love…’ Clarice Lispector substitution, because I feel very strongly that Cixous deserves a Personal Anthology slot. I discovered Cixous from her writing on Lispector, and I think she’s devastatingly wonderful.

This story, for example. It is, quite literally, luminous. In it, a woman goes blind from myopia, then has an operation which causes her to regain her sight. On one Tuesday in January, everything that was obscured from her slowly comes back into view.

“What was not is. Presence comes out of absence, she saw it, the features of the world’s face rise to the window, emerging from effacement, she saw the world’s rising.”

The feeling of reading it is close to elation. But the woman’s euphoria is tinged with the tiniest hint of mourning (what elation isn’t!) – not for her blindness, but for the fact that the present moment is passing, the moment in which her blindness is still visible within the more solid things of the world. The felt sense of doubt amongst the certainties of seeing.

As a text about blindness, it manages to escape the trap that Sontag identifies in Illness as Metaphor, of making disability into a cipher for some kind of moral failing. Cixous herself had myopia, and this story is at least semi-autobiographical. I work as an audio describer, so I often speak with people who have visual impairments. It’s made me realise that there are things that sight hides from us – ambiguities that the rationality of vision refuses to let us see. Those of us with sight don’t live in the knowledge of the things that we don’t know – that’s why a magician’s misdirection works so well on us. We assume that everything is already revealed. 

English translation published in Veils, alongside an essay by Jacques Derrida and drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Stanford University Press, 2001