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Self-Identity and Narrative Imagination

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Abstract

Self-identity is not constituted by more or less accurate facts or truth about ourselves, but is configured presentation to ourselves and others. It is the committed and promised narrative fiction patched up out of the porous existence, rather than the truth we discover. Self-identity is intentionally and attentionally forged, through imaginative narrativity, in response to the demand of the questions “Who are you?” and “Who am I?” It is called out at the intersubjective intersection as a commitment and promise.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 118.

  2. 2.

    Existence means radical solitude and interiority; as Levinas said, “Existence is the Sole Thing I Cannot Communicate; I Can Tell About it, but I Cannot Share My Existence.” [Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard, A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 57].

  3. 3.

    John Van Den Hengel, S. C. J., “Paul Ricoeur’s Oneself As Another and Practical Theology,” Theological Studies 55 (1994): 458–480, 461.

  4. 4.

    Gert J. Malan, “Ricoeur on Time: From Husserl to Augustine,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 73, no. 1 (2017): 5, https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v73i1.4499.

  5. 5.

    Jonathan Bennett, “Time in Human Experience,” Philosophy 79, no. 2 (2004): 165–183, 173, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0031819104000221.

  6. 6.

    Imitation of temporal movements brought by action.

  7. 7.

    Synthesis of the actions by meanings or purposes.

  8. 8.

    Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 169–190, 174.

  9. 9.

    Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” 179.

  10. 10.

    Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” 180.

  11. 11.

    Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” 180.

  12. 12.

    Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” 180.

  13. 13.

    Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” 178.

  14. 14.

    In Oneself as Another, Ricoeur states, “I propose to define discordant concordance, characteristic of all narrative composition, by the notion of the synthesis of the heterogeneous. By this I am attempting to account for the diverse mediations performed by the plot: between the manifold of events and the temporal unity of the story recounted; between the disparate components of the action—intentions, causes, and chance occurrences—and the sequence of the story; and finally, between pure succession and the unity of the temporal form, which, in extreme cases, can disrupt chronology to the point of abolishing it” [Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 141].

  15. 15.

    Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. VI: Time Regained, trans. A. Mayor and T. Kilmartin, revised by D. Enright (New York: Random House, 1993), 529.

  16. 16.

    Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. VI: Time Regained, 262.

  17. 17.

    Lars Iyer, “The Sphinx’s Gaze. Art, Friendship and Philosophical in Blanchot and Lévinas,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 39, no. 2 (2001), 197.

  18. 18.

    Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 163.

  19. 19.

    Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, 46.

  20. 20.

    Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 201.

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Correspondence to Guoping Zhao .

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Zhao, G. (2020). Self-Identity and Narrative Imagination. In: Subjectivity and Infinity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45590-3_17

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