The comprehensive anteriority of narrative identity over autobiographic memory

Abstract

If autobiographical memory holds a fundamental role in the formation of personal identity, what can one expect to happen to identity in amnesic ca ses where autobiographical memory is, to a greater or lesser degree, compromised? In these cases, are individuals deprived of their personal identity? In order to come up with some hypotheses to answer this question, the present work will follow the following path: at first, a brief discussion about the current understanding of the concept of autobiographical memory will be presented, in order to expose its main terminological difficulties and explain its fundamentally narrative character; then, the concept of destructive plasticity, found in Catherine Malabou, will be presented, with the purpose of sustaining that personal identity has always been disruptive, therefore, this feature is not restricted to pathological or traumatic cases, which favors the understanding of a personal identity in the complexity of human temporal experience; finally, it will be argued that there is a possible convergence between the notions of destructive plasticity and the notion of narrative identity in Paul Ricœur. It is intended to demonstrate that, unlike a treatment of the problem of personal identity that places memory as a basis for identity, with regard to the relationship between autobiographical memory and narrative identity, it is the narrative identity that has a temporal and comprehensive precedence in relation to autobiographical memory, which can be attested from the basic level of human cognition to the way in which selfattestation is poetically given.