Richter, A: Directions of the Heart

Written as an exchange of letters between a sender and her addressee both of which appear under the name ‘Jane‘, this work deviates from what Jaques Lacan contemptuously names the "university discourse"; the "knowing discourse". Cascading over a theoretical corpus from Structuralism (Barthes) to Feminism (Cixous), Deconstruction (Derrida) to the Psychoanalytic, this correspondence follows the route of a love life, the terms and conditions for its occurrence and the suffering that accompanies it. Through a disjointed stream of memory an ars poetic love story is sewn together dominated by fragmentation and existing in a temporality that is both at once a present-past. Yet it is precisely the lapses in chronology which are the stylistic index of this text that hold the narrative structure together in a way that is most telling of a love life - this particular love life and the universal experience of Love. Love which can never be spoken of in finite terms, which always strives towards the epistolary yet falls short, failing to accurately portray the psychic life it documents.