Invited lecture on “Whispered Secrets, Encrypted Lives” at “The Everyday Life of Deconstruction: On the Anecdotal in Jacques Derrida und Hélène Cixous”

Naomi Waltham-Smith is giving an invited lecture entitled “Whispered Secrets, Encrypted Lives” at a two-day conference hosted by the Universität Zürich on “The Everyday Life of Deconstruction: On the Anecdotal in Jacques Derrida und Hélène Cixous.” Her pre-circulated text, written during the final months of a fellowship at Akademie Schloss Solitude among a community of international writers and artists, is an experimental essay that explores the undecidability between fiction and reality that guards the secrets of the anecdotal life. For her talk, she offers reflections and anecdotes on the practice of writing and on the life of her text in its entanglements with Cixous and Derrida’s exchanges about reading, listening, and secrets.