The Anatomy of a Break Up

Thoughts of suicide, depression, and listlessness for weeks on end are just a few ways the loss of a lover is mourned. Unrequited love can open an abyss in which time and activities cease, or it can turn us towards life, as Rilke states in The Duino Elegies, sending us trembling like arrows, leaping into the future. Roland Barthes wrote A Lover’s Discourse after separating from a lover: his compendium of reflections from the lover’s perspective makes the solitary sorrow less so, by reflecting on the universal experience of madness, delusion, and exaltation when falling in love, and later the jealousy, anxiety, and sorrow distance imparts. Barthes traces the trajectory of love, which feels so personal and irreplaceable, and in doing so reveals the common course of love: “(‘It develops, grows, causes suffering and passes away’ in the fashion of a Hippocractic disease): the love story (the ‘episode’, the ‘adventure’) is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.”

Sophie Calle took the arrow’s course upon her lover’s spurning and transformed her misery into art. As obsessive as Barthes, she explores and classifies love from the perspective of the break-up. Her lover ended their relationship in an email that closed with the line, “Take care of yourself.” Her exhibition now showing at the Paula Cooper Gallery is her response. Calle consulted one hundred and seven women and asked them analyze the letter according to their professions: a markswoman shoots the letter, a parrot chews up the crumpled letter, a copy editor breaks the letter down grammatically and calls it repetitive, the criminal psychologist calls the letter’s author manipulative and psychologically dangerous “or/and a great writer.” Although Calle won’t reveal the author’s identity in the exhibition or in later interviews – according to her, “What I’m putting on show is a dumping… I don’t talk about the man, and all the better. The subject is the letter, the text…” – the psychologist’s analysis is accurate in at least one respect: Calle’s former lover is a respected French writer, Grégoire Bouillier.

With the aid of the community of women’s responses, Calle depicts the anatomy of a break-up while on the rebound. In the video of Calle’s session with a family mediator, where the letter sits in a chair across from Calle in place of the lover, Calle works through her grief, her astonishment, and attempts to move past it. Although she didn’t like the letter, she states, it was better than nothing, and transforming it into this exhibition “has done [her] a lot of good.” It was good for her and even better for us, for the ephemeral relationship ended with a relic that Calle has transformed into a poignant meditation on lost love and the lover’s obsession. Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse, “the love which is over and done with passes into another world like a ship into space, lights no longer winking: the loved being once echoed loudly, now that being is entirely without resonance (the other never disappears when or how we expect).” With Take Care of Yourself, Calle bids her love adieu. As she states, in the end, “the project had replaced the man.”