Les contradictions de l’autobiographie comme temporalisation de l’identité personnelle

• Main Author: Claude Dubar
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ADR Temporalités 2013-07-01
• Series: Temporalités
• Subjects: autobiography; temporalization; personal identity; forms of identity
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/temporalites/2408

This article attempts to answer the following question : in what way and how can an autobiography – as a life story written by an author in view of telling his/her life history – reveal to the reader a definition of the personal identity of the person who wrote it ? Taking off from a conception of temporalities as being modes of temporalization, the article distinguishes the time/tense (present) of the narrative, the time/tense (past) of the experience being recounted and the “extra time” (future) of the project “of interpreting oneself to oneself” inherent in the narrative identity, the core of a personal identity, according to Ricœur. Using four autobiographies, the article picks out the argumentative formulae that might apply to the “personal identity” of their authors : “I am innocent” (Rousseau) ; “I am my neurosis” (Sartre) ; “I am somebody” (Beauvoir) ; “I am an academic from the British working class” (Hoggart). After elucidating the connections between “identity forms” and “personal identity”, the article shows the contradictions that crop up when one seeks to combine the determining factors of a social identity with the unique decisions inherent in a personal identity.