Sharon Kivland's 'Envois' Reimagines Lacan's Seminars as Love Letters

Sharon Kivland's 'Envois/The Complete Correspondence' (Tenement Press, £20) presents a fictional sequence of love letters from Jacques Lacan to the artist, spanning 1953 to 1981. The book collapses Lacan's yearly seminars into epistolary form, excising explicit theory while preserving his cadences and rhetorical authority. Kivland, whose practice merges psychoanalytic theory and fiction, previously explored letter writing in 'These Are Addressed to You' (2025) and reimagined Freud's travels in 'Freud on Holiday' (2006–13). Each section of 'Envois' opens with a note on the relationship's state, mirroring the deferred structure of analysis. In 1968, Kivland writes of seeing Lacan less frequently due to activist engagements. The work performs a literary critique of Lacan's voice and pedagogical methods, offering a more pointed engagement than recent appropriations of Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus and Olivia Laing.