Phenomenology 2005

Volume 2, Issue Part 1, 2007

Selected Essays from Latin America Part 1

Narracion (Ricoeur) e Interpelacion (Levinas)
la identidad personal como acontecimiento generador de historia

Th is paper deals with the ontological-critical question about identity as posed in the productive confrontation between “narrative identity” (Ricoeur) and “prescriptive identity” (Levinas). It examines the structural character of the human disproportion disclosed in action as an ontic relationship invested with the totalizing and at once alterative dynamism of desire. The analysis of desire, in which both authors converge, dismisses, on the one hand, the projective modes of identifi cation and, on the other hand, stresses a mode of identity conceived as a selfhood that emerges as an ontic-alterative traumatization of desire-ofbeing and of being-in-time. An ontic and experiential event, as a historical possibility that unexpectedly corresponds to human disproportion, makes the selfhood of the ego come to pass through the revelation of the Other/other as an untimely presence that takes over and surmounts narrative mediation and ethical interpellation by introducing hope.