The unbearable lightness of the self: selfness between existence and narrative

Abstract

This article aims to present the relevance of the narrative resource in the representation and in the constitution of the selfness. To achieve this goal, a comparative strategy was chosen between an anti-narrative and narrative positions with regard to the powers of narration in apprehending and composing the domain of identifications. In a first moment, a reconstruction of Jean-Paul Sartre's positions on narration will be carried out, based on the phenomenological ontology of Being and nothingness, as well as the considerations about narrative and identity found in the novel Nausea and in the text of War diaries: notebooks from a phony war. The next moment will explore narrative arguments in Alasdair MacIntyre's After virtue, Charles Taylor’s The sources of the self, and especially Paul Ricoeur’s  in Time and narrative and Self as another. Finally, in the most strictly comparative moment, it is intended to show certain difficulties of the anti-narrative position, as well as the fruitfulness of the narrative position, with regard to the different way of managing the demand for meaning in the anti-narrative rejection of identity and the acceptance of the challenge of permanent elaboration of the meaning of the narrative position.