Narrative identity: a bridge between hermeneutics and the social sciences

This article arises from the need to structure a discourse on the narrative function that allows us to deal with our experience over chronological time from its refiguration into a time of our own, which we provide with meaning. We draw on our narrative identity to articulate this resorganisation either as subjects or as members of culturally determined collectivities. Paul Ricoeur constructs this aporetic corollary of Time and Narrative by combining the failure of speculative reason when dealing with temporal experience and the simplicity of our everyday use of narrative resources to deal with it. Following this hermeneutical corollary, we reconstruct the postulate, diffusely incorporated by political science in the final decades of the twentieth century, and interpret the meaning of the corrosion of identities that concerns contemporary sociology. We do so convinced of the theoretical profitability of the genealogical analysis that links this postulate with the Ricoeurian corollary.