Preorder ‡ Sharon Kivland, Envois / Love Letters from Lacan to Kivland, 1976-1981
£20.00
Tenement #20 / ISBN: 978-1-917304-06-1
300pp [Approx.] / 140 x 216mm
Edited by Dominic Jaeckle
Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves
Forthcoming, 19.07.25
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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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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.