Review of Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself

The break-up letter—in all its melodramatic glory— is not only a stinging force of creative inspiration (Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms may have never been penned if not for World War II nurse Agnes von Kurowsky’s dismissal of their romance as mere flirtation) but has also persisted as a popular artistic form since the eighteenth century epistolary. The nineties and the early aughts ushered in The Internet Age and provided yet another mode for individuals to craft backhanded reasons that things just ‘weren’t going to work out’: the break-up email. Despite the email’s dwindling relevance as a form of instant communication, it’s still being used as a device in popular contemporary novels such as Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Sally Rooney’s Normal People to chronicle their characters attempts (and failures) at romantic relations with one another. Perhaps the email remains so resonant in representing the difficult nature of sincere communication in our present moment because it sits between a mimicry of the physical letter while also representing the beginnings of the 21st century’s digitalization of social contact. However, well before these current meditations on the email, artists such as Sophie Calle were examining the form while it was still being used in its prime—particularly in reference to her personal disconnection with an actual lover. 

In April of 2004, artist and photographer Sophie Calle received a break-up email from her ex-lover that closes with the phrase: “Take care of yourself.” Calle takes this advice and borrows his words for the title of her artist’s book Take Care of Yourself, a compilation of 107 responses and interpretations from women who were asked to compose a reply to that email, from the perspective of their respective professions or artistic endeavors. Published by French publishing house Actes Sud in 2007, this hefty book—twelve by eight inches and 424 pages—is filled with the images, texts, documents, and art of the women who participate in Calle’s conceptual performance of collective and public ‘processing’ of a no-longer private correspondence. 

Each entry in the book consists of a photograph of the female participant, a caption that distinguishes them by name/profession, and the participant’s interpretation or response to the email collaged beside or on top of their portrait. In each photograph, the participant is captured looking or interacting with a printed version of the email within their professional, creative or domestic context. Some of the participants create detailed art pieces which are inspired by their reading of the email, and others include analyses or interpretations which pick apart the email word by word. This wide array of contributions include (but are not limited to): an accountant who lays out the phrasing of the letter onto a balance sheet, a clairvoyant’s tarot card reading, an ikebana artist who presents an arrangement of flowers, and even a teenage girl who responds to the email via text, seen through a photograph of her Blackberry screen: “He thinks he’s cool!”¹

Akin to a scrapbook (albeit an elevated version), the pages are by no means uniform in font, formatting or texture. The immersive effect of the project is tangibly felt through the glossy and smooth finish of photographs, the handwritten interpretations copied onto natural and fibrous paper, and the thin rice paper-like feel of little booklets sewn in for narrative pieces.  Multi-media opportunities for submersion in the project extend beyond the page. The DVDs included in the book contain a clown’s exaggerated and camp-y reading of the email, a sharpshooter who shoots a printed version of the letter that has been pasted onto a target, and other various responses. Any straightforward reading experience of the book is physically disrupted by the project’s multimedia nature. One must get up to put the disc into the DVD player, turn the book sideways with squinted eyes to read the tiny scribbles in the margins, or become absorbed in the booklet of fifty pages that enters a completely different narrative then the one of Calle and her ex-lover. In Roland Barthes’ seminal work S/Z, he imagines a “writerly”² literature, which requires the reader to co-create meaning in the text: “the networks are many and interact [where] it has no beginning, [and where] we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main.”³ By displaying her ex-lover’s email at the beginning of this work, Calle feigns its function as the guidepost of meaning. However, this guidepost is soon cut up, replaced, analyzed, dissected, collaged, mocked and transformed into assorted mediums that the reader must actively attend to, negating the email’s authority as the main mode of entry. Whether it be the ballet dancer’s melodramatic pirouettes across the room with crumpled letter in frame, or a chess player’s stolid description of gameplay inspired by Calle’s ex-lover’s ambiguous phrasing; the reader is invited to participate in the construction of meaning through a myriad of entrances. Yet, what is the meaning, or meanings, that Calle hopes to locate through this process? 

At the center of many of Calle’s art pieces are questions of voyeurism, the ethics of surveillance, and the erasure of the boundary of the public and personal. In The Hotel (1981), Calle took a job as a chambermaid and photographed hotel guests’ belongings without their knowledge.⁴ Her first artist’s book titled Venetian Suite (1983) is a diaristic documentation of the two weeks she followed a man (unbeknownst to him), all the way to Venice.⁵ The Address Book (1983), is a catalogue of Calle’s efforts to meet with strangers she contacts from an address book she found on the streets of Paris.⁶ In most of these works Calle involves herself as a subject, while producing the accompanying anecdotal and observational writings that narrate the process of living out these performance pieces. Although Calle’s personal life may be at the forefront of Take Care of Yourself, this piece stands out among her other works because she is not (directly) part of the rhetorical meaning-making. Instead, she deliberately asks for meaning to be made outside of herself and her actions. Calle states this intention in her quasi-artist statement at the beginning of the work:

Art critic Gabrielle Moser proposes that Calle’s choice to spotlight the collective dissecting and processing of her break-up through the female participants’ middle-class professions and artistic pursuits exposes the often devalued affective labor of  ‘working-through’: “The sharing of emotions about a traumatic experience in a public forum is often shown amongst groups of  women . . . Working-through is constructed as a form of feminine, messy, emotional labour that does not seem to produce a tangible or usable product.”⁸ Take Care of Yourself applies socially accepted forms of middle-class labor that produce capital to the messy, intimate and emotional object of the break-up email. Through this process, the false binary of acceptable and unacceptable forms of labor (which are often gendered), is splintered.

Since affective labor does not work towards a finished or consumable product, many of the responses from the participants include metatextual explanations of process, illuminating the indeterminate nature of a project which deals with the intimate. There are pencil scratches and circles with red pen, commentaries on the multiple drafts that an interpreter has decided to scrap, and reflections on conversations between participants and Calle on the production of the interpretation: “Sophie liked the text in that form, the rough version.”⁹ Calle even includes many of the participants’ navigation of their own moral qualms with the project. A philologist describes her suspicions toward Calle: “A ‘breakup’ email. I’m putting breakup between quotes because I’m quoting Sophie Calle. That doesn’t mean I trust her.”¹⁰ A writer questions Calle’s true intentions: “If Sophie had loved him as much as she said, she wouldn’t have summoned a whole squadron of women to help her get over it.”¹¹ These intrusions of the participants onto their own works over Calle’s request causes the messy and laborious process of ‘working-through’ to be put on display without any definitive conclusion. Additionally, Calle’s supposed role objective curator is consciously destabilized as the participants share her involvement in the development and assemblage of their responses.  By foregrounding the unease of her participants and undermining her own status as an unbiased steward of their responses, Calle gestures towards how uncomfortable and unsatisfying the process of affective labor can be. There is a purposeful sense of irony imbued in the responses which attempt to take on these more technical or practical methodologies, (e.g. a bar graph splashed across two pages which compares the length of the twenty-two sentences in the email as a part of a researcher in lexicometry’s logical analysis), as they emphasize the nonsensicality in applying conventional methods of epistemology to the personal. The reader understands that the meaning attempted from something like the bar graph, does not provide the finality it seeks; interpersonal relation and communication cannot be categorized or understood so neatly. These technical responses along with the self-reflexive references which convey the precarious construction of the responses and participants’ concern over said precarity, allow Calle to further mark how unaccustomed we are in allowing this form of labor (and artistic expression) to be seen as legitimate.

The distrust (and even disdain) stated above by Calle’s participants in the project is not unusual in typical reception of her performance art. Her pieces are often accused of being self-indulgent and exploitative for their invasive examination of the personal in the public sphere. Calle’s dissemination of emotional processing through networks of women could be understood as an exploitative act. However, another reading of this work understands it as both a mimicry and interaction with an anti-patriarchal form of solidarity: the discourse of gossip. In this context, gossip can be defined as discourse on the personal and the intimate. ‘Gossip’ remains an explicitly feminized term and has been used as a derogatory accusation to condemn  the ‘vulgar’ and ‘unsophisticated’ discourse of the private sphere. Author Francesca Peacock outlines the history of ‘literary gossip’: “it’s personal writing, either about its author and their family or about other lives they know intimately; it’s writing that pushes the margins of what is acceptable to reveal . . . combined with an awareness that these will become at least semi-public.”¹² On the most basic level of analysis, Take Care of Yourself follows the parameters of this genre as it involves countless women discussing the author’s personal life, specifically her romantic life, and distinctly the way a man has ‘wronged’ her-the ultimate archetype of stereotypical feminine gossip. Not only that, but Calle also represents an acute awareness of readership through the concerns of the participants who occasionally imagine their own feminized vilification because of their contributions to the discourse: “A whole squadron of women that’s what we are, with our pathetic texts, or our interpretations, our performances, pitting ourselves against the man.”¹³

In the past few decades, feminist scholars such as Irit Rogoff have attempted to reclaim gossip from this so-called “pathetic” reputation, by theorizing how it has acted as a site of resistance for women and marginalized persons who have been left out of universal narratives of history: “moments at which we pause, listen, are affected and attempt to theorize gossip [are] the moments at which we not only distrust the false immutable coherence of master narratives but also perhaps the false immutable coherence of our identities as subjects and tellers of those narratives.”¹⁴ Indeed, Calle’s figuration of 107 women completing inconclusive emotional labor over her personal experience disorients the patriarchal expectation for one coherent meaning or story.  The conventional view of gossip as a mode that women use to gain access to the superficial ‘juicy details’ of someone’s personal life is refuted through Calle’s complete deconstruction of the initial intimate discourse which began her project. In fact, she rarely implies that she provides her participants with further details of what occurred between her and her ex-lover beyond the break-up email that she received. The personal is centered in an approach that winks at stereotypical notions of gossip between women and then reveals its generative power beyond that stereotype. Peacock argues that literary gossip’s centering of the personal allows women to invent new modes of expression outside of the phallocentric”¹⁵ discourse that feminist theorist Helene Cixous denounces in her 1975 essay, The Laugh of the Medusa. Cixous defines phallocentric discourse as writing that is decidedly marked—libidinally, culturally, and politically—by and towards a masculine economy which perpetuates the repression of women. She calls for a new form of writing that “dislocate(s) this [patriarchal discourse from] ‘within,’ to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a new language to get inside of.”¹⁶ What better description could there be for the multiplicitous responses that deconstruct and reconstruct Calle’s ex-lover’s words towards their own particular meaning? 

The mystery of the man behind the letter and the meaning of his words looms large when this book is first picked up and opened; Calle’s artist’s statement poses this piece as her way of grieving the end of her relationship. Yet, if one turns to the very last page of the book, there lies a blank white sheet which could be mistaken as filler, with a small font in the right-hand corner where Calle pens her final words: “This was all about a letter. Not the man who wrote it . . . ”¹⁷ From the first page to the last, a shift in the purpose of the project has occurred. It’s likely that the stated purpose wasn’t reliable in the first place. In an interview, Calle sums up the function that the letter provided: “More than anything it became a kind of portemanteau [coat rack] upon which all of the women who have been left could hang their own experiences.”¹⁸ To close, I will engage with the collective meaning-making that’s central to the text, and hang my experience on the proverbial coat rack with my own interpretation of the break-up letter: 

“Dear Sophie, I love you but cannot keep it in my pants. Since you don’t want me to cheat, I’m doing the stand-up thing and breaking up with you so I can maintain my self-perception of being the ‘nice guy.’ Take care of yourself, X.”

Below you will find the original email which Calle claims this project is all about. Dissect it. Contribute to Calle’s centering of the personal—that which could never lead to a sensible conclusion:

: :

1. Calle, Sophie. Take Care of Yourself. Arles, France: Actes Sud, 2007.
2. Barbara Johnson, “Review of The Critical Difference, by Roland Barthes and Richard Miller,” Diacritics 8, no. 2 (1978): 4. https://doi.org/10.2307/465127.
3. Roland Barthes and Honoré de Balzac, S/Z. [1st American ed.]. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 2.
4. Alyssa Grossman, “Stealing Sophie Calle,” The Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 43, no. 1 (2018): 29. EBSCOhost.
5. Grossman, “Stealing Sophie Calle,” 29.
6. Ada Calhoun, “The Address Book,” Harper’s Magazine, October 2012, https://harpers.org/archive/2012/10/the-address-book/.
7. Calle.
8. Gabrielle Moser, “‘Working-through’ Public and Private Labour Sophie Calle’s Prenez Soin de Vouz,” N.Paradoxa: The Only International Feminist Art Journal 27 (January 2011): 7.
9. Calle.
10. Calle.
11. Calle.
12. Francesca Peacock, “Gossip as a Literary Genre, or Gossip as ‘l’écriture Feminine’?” Los Angeles Review of Books (August 13, 2024). https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gossip-as-a-literary-genre-or-gossip-as-lecriture-feminine/.
13. Calle.
14. Irit Rogoff, “Gossip as testimony: a postmodern signature,” Griselda Pollock, Discourse & Society 9, no. 2 (1998): 65.
15. Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer 1976): 879
16. Cixous, 887.
17. Calle.
18. Manou Farine, “Sophie Calle: le grand ‘je,’” L’Œil 593 (August 2007): 10.

• 

  Emma Peters

  Emma Peters is a writer and master’s student in English at the University of Chicago. She is currently researching literary representations of female suffering and death in the contemporary American novel, while acting as a fellow of the literary journal Common Forms.