A critic reads loss through two writers' vanishing words
In her literary column for Le Monde, Tiphaine Samoyault pairs Hélène Cixous's "Chat larme" with Barbara Cassin's "Les Mots qui fuient," two books that approach mourning through language itself.
Tiphaine Samoyault's feuilleton littéraire in Le Monde, published November 5, brings together two recent books built around the experience of loss: "Chat larme," by Hélène Cixous, and "Les Mots qui fuient," by Barbara Cassin, according to Le Monde.
The column's title, drawn from Samoyault's own text, suggests the thread she traces between the two: "On peut mettre en lien les mots qui hantent et les mots en fuite, le chat qui meurt et les moments où l'on ne parvient plus à appeler un chat un chat" — one can connect the words that haunt and the words that flee, the cat that dies and the moments when one can no longer call a cat a cat.
Beyond that framing, the source material does not detail the contents of either book or the full argument of the column. What is clear is that both writers, long associated with reflections on language, are read here side by side on the question of what happens to words when grief or absence takes hold.
Sources
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