Brick & mortar bookshops
/
order via asterism.
(Praise for Kivland’s
Envois.)
A new book from Sharon Kivland is always an event that upends form and deliciously enlivens the field of possibility, and
Envois does not disappoint. It’s less a demystification than an erotic re-visioning of Lacan’s seminars, and of the epistolary form itself: bombastic, voluptuary, and fraught with unconsummated fantasy. Above all it’s an exhilarating read, in which the reader, through a desiring deixis, becomes interpolated as the writer’s object. I loved it.
—Daisy Lafarge
In this careful reading of Lacan’s work, understood as an act of writing and creative editing, Kivland performs a literary critique, reshaping Lacan’s seminars through selective interventions that illuminate interpretive possibilities and bring the subtleties of his discourse into sharper focus. She interrogates Lacan’s voice, his rhetorical authority and his pedagogical methods, producing a more pointed engagement than recent purely fictive reimaginings of writers, such as the appropriation of Kathy Acker’s writing and identity in recent works by Chris Kraus and Olivia Laing.
Envois shows that engaging with Lacan is less about mastering a stable theory than inhabiting a language that illuminates lack, repetition and the persistent labour of desire, while also exposing the pressures, contradictions and many foibles of the man himself. Shedding light on a figure whose personal life was at times as fraught and theatrical as his clinical and philosophical output, the book also makes concrete Kivland’s methodological making, positioning reading itself as material. Accidentally or not, it provides a more approachable path into Lacan’s seminars than many canonical readings, blending his key ideas with the pleasures of Kivland’s endlessly mischievous, intimate literary play.
—Frank Wasser,
ArtReview
Reflexive, obsessive, and always teetering on the edge of abstraction, this is a text of experimental brilliance.
Envois is a chameleon, a scholar, a lover, and a clown.
—Helen Charman
Concluding his seminar on
The Purloined Letter (1956), Jacques Lacan reiterates his formula for communication, in which the sender receives from the receiver his own message in an inverted form; ‘
thus it is,’ Lacan summarises, ‘
that a letter always arrives at its destination.’ As Sharon Kivland dramatises, that destination can be reached only by a detour or détournement (and where the telos itself may paradoxically be a going astray). Here are the first final words of that journey, the phatic and the fantasmatic: the
‘the relationship accessible by some detour,’
in which ‘
we are always led astray.’
—Craig Dworkin
SK + JL, all
smoochy-woochy: Lacan’s seminars become a seducer’s diary, a series of secret and coded messages, from Lacan to Kivland. We, as audience members, suddenly realise that what we assumed Lacan was saying to us was meant for a singular lover. We went to the seminar, but we really witnessed a seduction and an ongoing affair. The seminar, then, becomes a symposium, becomes Plato’s
Symposium, which Lacan taught was an affair of transference. Psychoanalysis becomes, again, a discourse of love. Everything becomes strange and we reread Lacan with an intimacy instead of puzzlement. A new perplexity takes place. What hold did Kivland have on Lacan? Why would he choose to address her in this mode of public intimacy? What is the secret history of love and a love affair? How does the triangle of Sharon Kivland, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes form? Our own hysteria intensifies, why weren’t we loved like this? Sharon Kivland not only gives us a discourse of seduction, but seduces discourse, turns the tables, and leaves us a little in love.
—Benjamin Noys
In this witty, teasing, and endearing echo-chamber of love-letters, Lacan’s very words reverberate as they discuss desire, sex and jouissance. Thus Sharon Kivland realises Lacan’s most ancient program: to be an ‘
eternal lover’ whose discourse seduces us all.
Jean-Michel Rabaté
Envois is impossible to resist. A semiological honey-trap of word play, vintage postcards, and elegantly disposed numerals and pilcrows—not to mention the voyeuristic draw of private letters, ostensibly penned by a controversial superstar of psychoanalysis. By intrusion in the lover’s text, the reader stress tests boundaries of subjectivity and alterity, eavesdrops at lecture theatres, sidles into hotel rooms rented by the hour, and decodes the illustrious surnames referenced by first names and initials. Though disrupted by periodic bursts of tenderness, even bawdiness, the lover’s voice is darkly compelling: heroic, hectoring, inquisitorial, relentless. The text is taut with an erotic, almost sadomasochistic charge. Questions of legitimacy abound: the reader is illicit and complicit—but in what? The answer lies perhaps in the female recipient, who is remarkable by her absence. She is nevertheless everywhere present, observing and analysing—might it not be her hand that orchestrates this complex interplay of sender, recipient, reader, writer and author? What emerges from Kivland’s
Envois is a virtuoso interrogation of authorial positioning—a subtle and brilliant exploration of who holds authority, and how.
—Sonya Moor