abigail bruggs’s Reviews > The Years > Status Update

Talk to strangers, insult and chat them up, invent a self. They were disembodied, voiceless… they didn't get under our skin. What mattered was what we could do with them, the law of exchange; pleasure. The great desire for power and impunity was fulfilled. We made our way around a world of objects without subjects. The Internet engineered the dazzling transformation of the world into discourse.

It was normal for goods to arrive from all over the world and freely circulate, while men and women were turned away at the borders. To cross them, some had themselves locked into trucks, inert merchandise, and died asphyxiated when the driver forgot them in a Dover parking lot under the June sun.

We were increasingly irritated by the Americans' moral discourse, their shareholders, retirement funds, pollution of the planet, and loathing for our cheeses… "arrogance." They were conquerors with no ideals other than oil and the almighty dollar. Their values and principles-don't rely on anyone but yourself gave hope to no one but them, while we dreamed of "another world."

She feels herself in several difterent moments of her life that float on top of each other. Time of an unknown nature takes hold of her consciousness and her body too. It is a time in which past and present overlap, without bleeding into each other, and where, it seems, she flickers in and out of all the shapes of being she has been.

And as we watched and listened to these grown children, we wondered what bound us to each other. It wasn't blood or genes, only a present comprised of thousands of days spent together, words and gestures, meals, car trips, a great deal of shared experience that left no conscious trace.

…the sweetness of youth washed over us. The present swelled and carried us back to our twenties.

With the pill they had become the sole rulers of their lives, but word hadn't got out yet.

"Out of extreme narcissism, I want to see my past set down on paper and in that way, be as I am not”

These are her selves, it seems to her, who continue to exist in these places. In other words, past and future are reversed. The object of desire is not the future but the past…”

“…all the things she has buried as shameful dying, of and which are now worthy of retrieval, unfolding, in the light of intelligence. As her memory is gradually freed of humiliation, the future again becomes a field of action. Fighting for women's rights to abortion, against social injustice, and understanding how she has become the woman she is today, are all part of the same endeavor.”