Collage number 1

(N.B. This is not my writing. Check source at the end of posting)

"Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity points to the idea of a self as a storied self, as an entity made up of stories told, indeed, entangled in the stories that a person tells or that are told about her. Yet, this very mundane aspect of human beings is also a profoundly enigmatic element (2). This is because, in Ricoeur, the notion of narrative identity is grounded in an ontology deriving from Heidegger’s (1962) emphasis on temporality as the defining characteristic of human beings. The primacy of time in relation to being has to do with the understanding of being as the entity that questions itself as to its way of being.
(...)

Yet a basic aporia of time is its inscrutability. This may well be because we are encompassed by time, as I have just indicated, so that it is impossible to stand outside it. The avenue that Ricoeur follows is to explore the possibility that narrative is the form in which we can overcome the unrepresentability of time (when we think of it in the singular), and the device by which we express the lived, or phenomenal, aspect of the temporality of being. The underlying idea is that the act of telling a story "can transmute natural time into a specifically human time" (1984: 17). In Ricoeur's approach, the term narrative identity seems to join up two problematics of subjectivity: concerning identity, and concerning the relation of history to fiction in the process of the figuration of temporality. The two problematics are correlated by way of the idea that time, and the way it is lived, provides the common ground for their co-articulation (3)."

from "The future of dialogue: Narrative identity, the exchange of memory, and the constitution of new spaces of belonging"
by Couze Venn

DRAFT - NOT FOR QUOTATION
(yes, I didn't respect the author's wish. I'm not sure what laws protect this guy. If it's just a draft, does it mean it doesn't have a copyright yet? Plus, I found it on the internet, by googling something up...)