A Lover's Discourse

Kivland read unsolicited ‘encounter’ emails as if they were intended for her alone in a sincere desire for a real love relation, until their repetition bored me. For some months in 2016 she posted them on Facebook, while she sought their form. Her friend A. C. wrote to tell her how much he was enjoying her lover’s discourse. The form became clear: after the French edition of Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (“Tel Quel”, Seuil, 1977). The French solicitations are translated into English in a rather literal manner, rendering them awkwardly strange. The book opens (and closes) with fragments of Barthes's text, also translated by Kivland.