Cécile Guilbert

Cécile Guilbert (b. 1963) is a French writer, essayist, and critic whose work occupies a singular position in French intellectual life, engaging the history of ideas, contemporary art, literature, and political thought through a demanding and personal critical prose. She publishes with Gallimard and with specialized presses.

Her books include Pour Guy Debord (Gallimard, 1996), a critical essay on the Situationist filmmaker and theorist; Saint-Simon ou l'être du paraître (Gallimard, 2002), a study of the memoir of the Duc de Saint-Simon; W.A.S.P.: Women Artists and Society in Paris 1890–1914 (2004); and a sustained body of literary and art criticism published in major French and international reviews, including Le Monde, Le Monde des livres, and Art Press. She contributed an essay to the Gallimard edition of Les Monts Analogues de René Daumal (2021), directed by Boris Bergmann, and has participated in events at the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection, among other institutions. Her writing returns consistently to the conditions of cultural production and to the relationship between singularity and historical structure in art and writing.