The Self is Embodied and Discursive: Tracing the Phenomenological Background of Ricoeur's Narrative Identity

This chapter situates Ricoeur's account of the self within the context of contemporary debates concerning the narrative self. Some critics argue that narrative identity only captures one aspect of the self: the reflexive side which is articulated in language. They argue that this aspect of selfhood needs to be complemented by an experiential subjectivity that is prelinguistic. In the chapter, I return to Ricoeur's early phenomenological Fallible Man in search of an answer to the question of whether the latter aspect of the self can be located there. In this book, Ricoeur provides a notion of the self that is not merely linguistic and narrative, but that is embodied.