Incinarration: What Do We Carry? (The French List)

A genre-defying book about survival, transformation, and the human ability to rise from the ashes.

Hélène Cixous’s powerful new book, masterfully translated by Peggy Kamuf, is a vivid journey through fire. From the ashes of wars, wildfires, and upheaval, Cixous traces a dramatic path across time—from the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of Oran to the European wildfires of 2022—weaving a rich, intimate narrative that merges history, autobiography, and myth. With her piercing, lyrical voice, Cixous confronts the human cost of destruction and upheaval, and asks a universal question: What do we carry with us when everything we know is falling to ashes?

In Incinarration, Cixous finds hope in the power of words, memory, and imagination to illuminate our darkest moments and redeem the future. As forests burn and regimes collapse, Cixous shows us how stories become a form of resistance—a way to remember, to bear testimony, and to find renewal in the face of oblivion.

Hélène Cixous is professor emeritus of literature at the Université Paris VIII, where she founded and directed the Centre de recherches en études féminines. She is the author of more than seventy works of fiction, plays, and collections of critical essays, including Mdeilmm, Rêvoir, Well-Kept Ruins, We Defy Augury, and Tomb(e).

Peggy Kamuf is the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She has written, edited, or translated many books, by Derrida and others, and is coeditor of the series of Derrida’s seminars at the University of Chicago Press.