Sharon Kivland, Her Discourse
JOAN, 2025
https://joanpublishing.org/Sharon-Kivland
With a Foreword by Patrick ffrench and an Afterword by Timothy Mathews
What a pleasure it was to respond to Sharon’s amazing book, full of invention and humanity.
‘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.
Proceeding from a single meticulously applied principle, Sharon Kivland's Her Discourse splits, shuffles, and deals a new hand out of Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, repurposing his book as an ambiguous tarot of female language and desire. Drawn from Barthes’s text but recovering his anguished passion as hers, every luminous fragment documents the memory of a lost correspondence, and appears as a new missive from the fraying edge of obsession, passion, and desire. Her Discourse aches with the unbearable presence and absence of the beloved, and testifies to the mysteries of connection that forever suture text, desire, and language to all those elusive others that perpetually escape them.
Francis Gooding
The subject of Her Discourse eats and breathes desire and sweats language. Her existence is consumed by her love story, which isn’t a story, but the listing, listless, lunatic, looping contours of ecstatic suffering. This small storm of a book, with its granular analysis and fermenting prose, admits the muck and vapour of emotions, the excess and poverty of words. Its veering intensities make the simple deliverance of classical romance ridiculous. And unnervingly, it leaves me wondering if I have ever truly, madly loved.
Sally O’Reilly