NARRATIVE AND MEDICINE 2012

Title of the paper:

“Being-in-stories: On reasons and causes in self-narratives”

Abstract: Reasons and causes typify two grammars that belong to contrasting realms and operations of discursive semiotics tending to incommensurability. These grammars institute a qualitative discrimination between the self-efficacy of being someone and the symmetric (selfless) efficacy of being something or undergoing something. To be someone consists, it shall be argued, in the semiotic competence for the user of signs to interpret and describe herself in agreement with the grammar of practical reasons. This competence is actualized by a self-narrative performance in which the dialectical relationship between reasons and causes, actions and events, becomes a structuring force. The events constrain agents to question themselves and wonder if a meaningful account is possible. In so doing, agents (re)define their practical strategies of self-interpretation, strategies that include the fact of declaring life (non)understandable-and/or-(non)explainable or understandable-and-explainable or neither-understandable-nor-explainable. In the last instance the autonomy of the grammar collapses and the ontology and phenomenology of experience shows how agents live in the midst of an unstable and ambivalent tension (encompassing autopoiesis and autophagy) due to the continuous crossing-over between the possibility of the self-efficacious force of reasons and the actuality of the blind force of exogenous causes.

Biographical information: Paulo Jesus, BA/MA in Psychology 2000 (Coimbra University, Portugal, and Louvain Catholic University, Belgium), PhD in Philosophy and Social Sciences 2006 (EHESS, Paris), was a Visiting Scholar at the Philosophy Department of NYU and Columbia (2007/08), and Invited Professor at EHESS (Paris, 2009). He is currently a Researcher at Philosophy Center of Lisbon University and Assistant Professor at Oporto Lusophone University. His main research interests include the philosophy and psychology of selfhood, time and narrative. His major publication is a book entitled “La poétique de l’ipse: Etude sur le ‘je pense’ kantien” (Peter Lang, 2008, 508p.)