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
