A lover's Discourse / Un discours amoureux by Sharon Kivland (2018)

@the 8th Annual Surrey Poetry Festival

@Poetry in Expanded Translation, London

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VANESSA

Vanessa thinks she might have fallen in love with me. She wants to meet new people, with me, perhaps. She finds my profile rather nice, and suggests that she and I might meet. She has been kind enough to send me a photograph of herself, but if I would like to see more, suggests that I visit her profile. She sends me little kisses.

Tu es mon coup de coeur. Je voudrais faire de nouvelles rencontres, avec toi peut-être ? Ton profil est plutôt sympa et peut-être qu’on pourrait se rencontrer? Si tu veux voir plus de photos, viens visiter mon profil. Bisous. 


I read unsolicited ‘encounter’ emails as if they were intended for me alone in a sincere desire for a real love relation, until their repetition bored me. I posted them on Facebook, while I sought their form. My friend A. C. wrote to tell me how much he was enjoying my lover’s discourse. The form became clear: after the French edition of Roland Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux (“Tel Quel”, Seuil, 1977).


How is this book written
Everything is part of this principle: that we should not reduce the lover to a mere symptomatic subject, but rather make us hear what there is in her unreal voice, that is to say, intractable. [...] it gives reading a place of speech: the place of someone who speaks lovingly in front of the other (the loved object), who does not speak.
Comment est fait ce livre
Toute est partie de ce principe : qu’il ne fallait pas réduire l’amoureux à un simple sujet symptomal, mais plutôt faire entendre ce qu’il y a dans sa voix d’inactuel, c’est-à-dire d’intraitable. [...] il donne à lire une place de parole : la place de quelqu’un qui parle en lui-même, amoureusement, face à l’autre (l’objet aimé), qui ne parle pas. 

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