Preorder ‡ Sharon Kivland, Envois / Love Letters from Jacques Lacan to Sharon Kivland, 1953-1981

Tenement #22 / ISBN: 978-1-917304-06-1
306pp / 140 x 216mm
Edited by Dominic Jaeckle
Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves

Forthcoming, 25.10.25

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Somewhere between fact & fiction,
memoir & novelisation ... a thread of
correspondences.

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A neither/nor publication defying easy category, 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; 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.

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The sum of all values in a letter is its meaning. What it means is up for grabs, its grabbiness tied, like the knot, to the love, here, of the woman. But what we know is that the woman does not, cannot, exist. Kivland, here, is this non-existent woman, meaning everywhere, and everywhere drives meaning. The meaning of this book is desire, its way of constricting, dilating, evading, enveloping... The problem with this book is that it is beautiful, which is also the problem of the woman. Still, there is no stopping the encore.

Vanessa Place

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

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

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

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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

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Praise for Kivland

Sharon Kivland is a remarkable writer, thinker and artist.

Ali Smith

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

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

Kate Briggs

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See here for a further word on this title.

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Stickered editions will carry a cover adornment; a photograph doctored by Kivland, circa 2024.

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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.