Sharon Kivland — Tenement Press

_{Envois / The Complete Correspondence :

Love Letters from Jacques Lacan to Sharon Kivland,

MCMLIII-MCMLXXXI
Sharon Kivland

Tenement Press #22
978-1-917304-06-1
300pp [Approx.]

£20.00

_{PREORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE}

Publishing 5th October 2025

Somewhere between fact & fiction,

memoir & novelisation ... a thread of

correspondences.

LOVE’S LETTRE

For, after & to

Sharon Kivland

When you want to get

to the truth,

sometimes you give up

searching for meaning.

We make this mistake

all the time—

I will always tell the

truth telling you

telling you off.

You will place meanings

here despite yourself.

C’est ça.

That’s all, isn’t it?

Scott Thurston

A neither/nor publication defying easy category—a book that rests somewhere between fiction and memoir—Envois is a collection of letters sent to Sharon Kivland by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan during the course of their long and stormy love affair from 1953 until his death in 1981.

A publication assembled chronologically—following the yearly seminars of Lacan and structured per their delivery—and in which love emerges as a form of appropriation; a litmus for authenticity; a look book for learning; an atlas for forms of yearning; a map for multimodal thinking; a log book for passing hours; a calendar to keep track of the quickening of time; an itinerary of preoccupations; a discipline; a vocation; a dressing up and dressing down of language; a lens; an aperture; a tool shed; a window; a corridor; and/or an arena of investigation. Kivland was not listening for psychoanalytic theory and she is faithful to the words of her beloved, attuned to his speech towards her and her alone... And yet, well, and yet, all that remains as her master breaks the silence.}

_{FROM ENVOIS VI / PROMISES MADE BY

JACQUES LACAN TO SHARON KIVLAND

(An excerpt.)

1953–1954

You will obtain from me the answers I am in a position to give you.

You will certainly be well satisfied.

You may expect stimulation, amusement, and relaxation.

You will have something like the distilled essence.

You will have a taste of reading.

You will see the point of what we can do together.

We will let ourselves be guided by the experience itself.

You will find happy chance, a benevolent divine conjunction,
in everything new that is discovered.

I will portray for you the sum of silence after which speech again

makes its appearance.

I will show you what way the danger of a forcing of a subject emerges.

You need more, and I hope to be able to prove it to you.

I would like to give you a sense of where we are heading.

I think it is necessary to lay down some guidelines.

I want to lead you to one of those points which offers some perspective.

I will show you the significance of speech.

I promise you another example.

You will see the connection with the function of destructionism

in the constitution of human reality.

I will give you the formula that the unconscious is the discourse of the other.

I will introduce a bouquet.

I will take you to the heart of the matter.

I hope to teach you new categories.

I want to take you somewhere.

We’ll try to go one step further.

In a moment, if you want, we’ll go one step further.

I’m going to let you in on a secret.

You’ll see it better with the help of my apparatus.

I am going to show you the moot point to which the handling of the

imaginary transference leads.

I will show you two signposts.

You will be able to distinguish the planes of identification,

and a whole range of nuances, an entire fanning out of forms at play.

I will prove it to you.

I wish only to open a small door for you, whose threshold we will

someday cross.

I am showing you the paths for the realisation of being.

[...]

_{ENVOIS VI IS AVAILABLE VIA INTEGRAPHIA HERE}}

^{Kivland’s definition of the letter encompasses the alphabetic and the epistolic, both of which have appeared consistently throughout her published work. For Kivland, letters are key to the history of psychoanalysis in the 20th century and the people who populate its case studies and waiting rooms.

Gabriel Levine Brislin,

Frieze

Companion Publications

︎︎︎ Kivland, Her Discourse (Joan, 2025) | In which ‘Her’ inner speech follows the affective events and accidents of a love story, one that would without her knowing be made into a text, this one or another. In a litany of amorous tropes, her passionate life is enumerated, catalogued as so many discursive events, some real, others abstract, with a shadowy sense of the déja-lu, as if translated from a lost work in a distant language—or as if that work translated this one.

︎︎︎ Kivland, These are Addressed to You (Bricks from the Kiln, 2025) | A collection of twenty-six abécédaire missives by Sharon Kivland, written and sent daily to the editors (Matthew Stuart & Andrew Walsh-Lister) between Friday 7 February and Tuesday 4 March 2025. Interjected with melancholic ‘Mes horizons’ postcard erasures and an insert of abcedminded replies by Matthew Stuart titled ‘A Letter Always Suggests a Word’, this publication is both a standalone edition and precursor to Bricks from the Kiln #8, which focuses on letters (alphabets) and letters (correspondence). These are Addressed to You addresses what it means to be addressed and to address, to write with love and scorn, to seal with a kiss and conceal impressions and hair within a letter’s folds, to inscribe with ink and thread, to speak with and to those we admire. Drawing on/from Freud and Lacan, Joyce and Carringdon, Camille Corot and many more, these letters are about writing and reading, about language falling and bumping you on the head.

Praise for Kivland

I read Sharon Kivland for the life-supporting habitat of her writing, a place to live and grow.

Kate Briggs

Sharon Kivland is a remarkable writer, thinker and artist.

Ali Smith

Sharon Kivland utilises the practices of fiction to create space for speculation, as a way of revealing certain psychic tensions. Her heretical invention is produced by acts of antipatriarchal subversion: screwing around inside the library, cutting parts out of the canon of psychoanalysis, sticking them elsewhere, getting all the details wrong on purpose, causing mischief in a way that makes self-important men very cross. Mockery as style becomes a way of loving men by loving women more, a practice that undermines patriarchal seriousness and undoes the need for vengeance. Kivland’s practice laughs at the father, which is a kind of love too.

Ed Luker,

The Los Angeles Review of Books}

^{Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer, an editor and publisher. Her novel Abécédaire was published by Moist Books in 2022, and its counterpart Almanach: A Year in the French Revolutionary Calendar is forthcoming from Grand Iota, 2025. A novel, Her Discourse—a companion to the Tenement Press publication of Envois, will release with JOAN, 2025.}