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Identity, Story, and Self-Hood

20/10/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"The very notion of selfhood (individual and social) is challenged by discourses where human subjects are increasingly defined as 'desiring machines' or 'effects of signifiers'. The best answer to this crisis of identity is not, however, to revive some substantialist notion of the person as essence, cogito or ego. We must look here again. Ricoeur suggests, to the resources of narrative. The most fitting response to the question 'Who is the author or agent?' is to tell the story of a life. Why? Because the enduring identity of a person, presupposed by the designation of a proper name, is provided by the narrative conviction that it is the same subject who perdures through its diverse acts and words between birth and death. The story tells us about the action of the ‘who’: and the identity of this 'who' is a narrative identity. This is what Ricoeur' terms an ipse-self.

The narrative self involves an ongoing process of self-constancy and self-rectification that requires imagination to synthesize the different horizons of past, present, and future. The narrative concept of self thus offers a dynamic notion of identity (ipse) that includes mutability and change within the cohesion of one lifetime…. This means, for instance, that the identity of human subjects is deemed a constant task of reinterpretation in the light of new and old stories we tell about ourselves. 'The subject becomes, to borrow a Proustian formula, both reader and writer of its own life. Selfhood is a cloth woven of stories told'" (Kearney 2004:108-109).

Kearney, Richard
2004 On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

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A Properly Narrated Story

16/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“In contradistinction to other elements peculiar to action-above all to the preconceived goals, the impelling motives, and the guiding principles, all of which become visible in the course of action-the meaning of a committed act is revealed only when the action itself has come to an end and become a story susceptible to narration. Insofar as any ‘mastering’ of the past is possible, it consists in relating what has happened; but such narration, too, which shapes history, solves no problems and assuages no suffering; it does not master anything once and for all. Rather, as long as the meaning of the events remains alive-and this meaning can persist for very long periods of time-’mastering of the past’ can take the form of ever-recurrent narration. The poet in a very general sense and the historian in a very special sense have the task of setting this process of narration in motion and of involving us in it. And we who for the most part are neither poets nor historians are familiar with the nature of this process from our own experience with life, for we too have the need to recall the significant events in our own lives by relating them to ourselves and others. Thus we are constantly preparing the way for ‘poetry,’ in the broadest sense, as a human potentiality; we are, so to speak, constantly expecting it to erupt in some human being. When this happens, the telling over of what took places comes to a halt for the time being and a formed narrative, one more item, is added to the world’s stock. In reification by the poet or the historian, the narration of history has achieved permanence and persistence. Thus the narrative has been given its place in the world, where it will survive us. There it can live on-one story among many. There is no meaning to these stories that is entirely separable from them-and this, too, we know from our own, non-poetic experience. No philosophy, no analysis, no aphorism, be it ever so profound, can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story” (Arendt 1993:21-22).

Arendt, Hannah
1993[1968] Men in Dark Times. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace & Company.

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