On the first-person plural Part I.

Julia Kristeva writes:

What follows, then, will be an autobiography in the first person plural, a”we” of complicity, friendship, love. This “we” is the setting commonly recommended by the social contract for illusions, idealizations, errors, constructions. To write the autobiography of this “we” is surely a paradox that combines the passion for truth of the “I” with the absolute logical necessity of being able to share this truth only in part. To share it, first of all, between “us,” so that this “we” survives. To share it also with you, so that an account, a report, a scheme remains...rather than have speech fall into the fervor of dreams or poetry. Being hyperbolic, this “we” will retain from the problem-ridden paths of “I”s only the densest image, the most schematic, the one closest to a cliche. Should I shy away from it?...Common sense notwithstanding, this hyperbolic “we” is, in effect, only a part of “me.” It is merely a temporary stability in which projections and identifications are settled among some and allow the history of a perpetually changing whole to be written. A “we” is alive only if it is never the same. As the chief locus of the image, it thrives only on the change of images. What the “I” loses in delegating itself to the group is partially regained in the metamorphoses of the “we.” It is by transforming itself, by changing itself totally that the collective image, the group portrait, proves it is a momentarily fixed passion. To speak of “us” is not an analysis; it is a history that analyzes itself. But isn’t any autobiography, even if it doesn’t involve “us,” a desire to make a collective public image exist, for “you,” for “us”? (from “My Memory’s Hyperbole”)

My copy of Endangered Pleasures, along with a book about the magical powers of good digestion, is, I’m informed, in transit. And so I tiptoe here to begin with the desire to sketch out a connection between pleasure endangered and our own need to embrace the first-person plural. But, too, I am pulled by Michelle’s response not only to consider the “momentarily fixed passion” of a never-fixed “we,”--champagne, cold and fluted, but also the ‘temporary stability’ of commodity as a type of witnessing vis-a-vis pleasure through cultural grungification and, I suppose, counter-grungification.