de l’amour of Franck Leibovici is an attempt to organise the literary production of love at the digital age. Through four chapters, we dive into a combination of reader-voyeur in a shady world, totally connected to the epistolary traditions but radically upset by the immense production of contemporary text.
One of the chapters of the book takes up the well-worn epistolary style of the “Spanish prisoner” or the “letter of Jerusalem” that has been rife since the 16th century in the West and is nowadays in the form of unwanted solicitations from young women who invade e-mail boxes. Here, the work of Franck Leibovici is to systematically answer his e-mails by imposing on himself a writing protocol - to which they bend - pushing this writing of fraud to unprecedented poetic extremes.
Two other chapters find their raw material in a dating site and a forum for dating encounters. By searching these thousands of pages of sentimental autobiographies and organising them - without ever altering the original text - de l’amour offers us the heart-stories of today, in the spirit of those who live them. The last part of the book is the conversational analysis of an erotic amateur video found on the Internet. Here remains only a partition that allows to replay the action, an opera libretto of a sex scene during which the silences are millimetered and the groans reproducible to the identical.
All these avatars of love portray the portrait of a generation that renews the codes of the meeting and the production of peripheral texts to these sentimental relationships. Through an ambitious “writing without writing” (Kenneth Goldsmith), Franck Leibovici signs his first book for Jean Boîte Éditions.