Narrative Identity and the Historical Subject: Ricoeur, Lévinas, and the Jesus of the Gospels

Abstract

Ricoeur’s account of narrative identity has become the standard instrument for reading the Gospelsas texts that constitute a self and address a reader. This article argues that the instrument is soundand that its most common application is not, because that application turns on an ambiguity between two theses Ricoeur himself keeps apart. The constitution thesis holds that a self is articulatedthrough the emplotment of a life, mediating the tension between sameness (idem) and selfhood(ipse). The substitution thesis holds that, for a subject known only through narrative, the narrativeis what there is — that the question of the referent lapses. The first is defensible and is Ricoeur’s;the second is a non sequitur. Ricoeur’s own theory of historical representation blocks it: standingfor is a referential obligation, the trace refers backwards, testimony is a claim answerable to fact,and attestation models the self’s certainty on the witness’s. A hermeneutics that reaches the substitution thesis has not extended Ricoeur; it has stopped short of him. Lévinas is then argued tobe a limit on narrative constitution rather than a supplement to it, since the face is what refusesthematization and a narrative is thematization. Two features internal to the Gospels serve as tests:the question “But who do you say that I am?”, put by a character to the audience of the narrationthat presents him, and the Emmaus scene, where the surplus of meaning is attributed to a personrather than a text.