122 pages
182 mm x 128 mm
90 mm cover flaps
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-7384394-3-0
£12 (£3 p&p UK)
Her Discourse, Sharon Kivland
Language was a skin: she rubbed her fingers against him. It was as if she had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of her words. Her language trembled with desire.
‘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.
With a Foreword by Patrick ffrench and an Afterword by Timothy Mathews
‘Proceeding from a single meticulously applied principle, Sharon Kivland's Her Discourse splits, shuffles, and deals a new hand out of Roland Barthes' 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
Sharon Kivland is a phenomenal writer, thinker and artist.
- Ali Smith
‘Impressively serious engagement with Barthes, super stimulating for the brain, and devastatingly funny. Like the cleverest student in the classroom, gone rogue. Such a subtle enquiry into questions of gender--less hammer, more scalpel. Also, beautifully produced by Joan.'
- Sonya Moor
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 was published by Grand Iota in 2025. Envois. The Complete Correspondence: Love Letters from Jacques Lacan to Sharon Kivland, MCMLXXIII–MCMLXXXI, a companion to Her Discourse, releases with Tenement Press in 2025.
Language was a skin: she rubbed her fingers against him. It was as if she had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of her words. Her language trembled with desire.
‘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.
With a Foreword by Patrick ffrench and an Afterword by Timothy Mathews
‘Proceeding from a single meticulously applied principle, Sharon Kivland's Her Discourse splits, shuffles, and deals a new hand out of Roland Barthes' 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
Sharon Kivland is a phenomenal writer, thinker and artist.
- Ali Smith
‘Impressively serious engagement with Barthes, super stimulating for the brain, and devastatingly funny. Like the cleverest student in the classroom, gone rogue. Such a subtle enquiry into questions of gender--less hammer, more scalpel. Also, beautifully produced by Joan.'
- Sonya Moor
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 was published by Grand Iota in 2025. Envois. The Complete Correspondence: Love Letters from Jacques Lacan to Sharon Kivland, MCMLXXIII–MCMLXXXI, a companion to Her Discourse, releases with Tenement Press in 2025.
© Joan Publishing