© Logoi.

ph – Journal of Philosophy - ISSN 2420-9775

N. I , 2, 2015 – P. Ricoeur and the Symphony of the Languages

Drew R. A. Desai

An Autoportrait of Paul Ricoeur.

Peer-reviewed Article. Received: April 04, 2015; Accepted: May 08, 2015

Abstract: Among Paul Ricoeur‘s writings we have an intellectual autobiography, as well as some scattered
remarks on the literary and painterly genres of autobiography and self-portraiture. We do not, however, have
anything like a sustained reflection on these kindred genres, an absence that is all the more surprising given
Ricoeur's avowal that «a systematic investigation of autobiography and self-portraiture would attest to the in
principle instability of narrative identity». This essay attempts to fill this absence by synthesizing Ricoeur's
scattered remarks on autobiography with his reflection on self-portraiture in the little-noticed essay, Sur un
autoportrait de Rembrandt (1987).

Tra gli scritti di Paul Ricoeur abbiamo un‘autobiografia intellettuale, come pure alcuni commenti sporadici
sui generi letterari e pittorici dell‘autobiografia e dell‘autoritratto. Tuttavia non abbiamo una riflessione
precisa su questi due generi affini: un‘assenza che sorprende ancor più data la dichiarazione di Ricoeur
secondo la quale «un‘investigazione sistematica sull‘autobiografia e il ritratto attesterebbe il principio
d‘instabilità dell‘identità narrativa». Questo saggio tenta di colmare questa assenza attraverso una sintesi tra
le osservazioni sparse di Ricoeur sull‘autobiografia e la sua riflessione sull‘autoritratto nel saggio breve dal
titolo Su un autoritratto di Rembrandt (1987).

Keywords: Ricoeur, Autobiography, Self-Portraiture, Narrative Identity, Painting

Parole chiave: Ricoeur, autobiografia, autoritratto, identità narrativa, pittura

***

As far as I know Paul Ricoeur never took a ‗selfie‘. Indeed, given the word‘s recent
coinage, it may well be that he simply could not have1. Philosophers, those beings who deal
radically with conceptualizations, who trace the roots of concepts, will recognize in the
term ‗selfie‘, however, as stemming from the fertile soil of the long-established genre from
which it adapts its name, self-portraiture. Now, if we understand self-portraiture in a
broad sense, one that includes its kindred genre, autobiography, we might say that we do
in fact possess some self-portraits of Ricoeur. To call these works 'self-portraits'
(autoportraits) in anything other than a metaphorical use of the term is a use of the term
that has to be justified. For the purpose of this paper we will ask for the reader's
indulgence, pointing to the prima facie family resemblance between self-portraiture and
autobiography, and recalling that Ricoeur himself thought they were to be investigated
together2.
The examples we have can be divided into two categories. On the one hand, we have the
first-order autobiographical material: an intellectual autobiography, Réflexion faite, as
well as numerous interviews in which he appears both as a philosopher and as a human
being, a being with a biography3. Added to these are the surprisingly intimate fragments

1 The word, shorthand for self-portrait, was coined, in 2002, only came into mainstream use in 2013, the
same year Oxford Dictionaries named it Word of the Year (though it has yet to be included in the canonical
Oxford English Dictionary). That the selfie is less a self-portrait of than a self-portrait with (some landmark,
object or person), ought not be taken as a radical revolution in the genre. Self-portraiture invariably portrays
'objects' other than the sitter-portraitist. We might cite, in this regard, the curious words of Rembrandt, the
only ones we know him to have said, attested by H. Matisse, «I have done nothing but portraits».
2 P. Ricoeur, Temps et récit, v. III, Seuil, Paris, 1985, p. 358. See below for a full discussion of this remark.
3 Cf. Id., La Critique et la conviction, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1995, where the interviewers point to this fact in

the form of a question: «You have devoted several important works to the theme of subjectivity; your most
recent work is entitled Soi-même comme un autre, but about you yourself, your life, your intellectual
background, very little is known» (p. 11). See also the 2001 interview with Alan D. Savage in ―Christianity and

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and reflections on living and dying (his own and others') published posthumously in the
beautiful volume Vivant jusqu'à la mort, alongside a moving portrait by his friend C.
Goldenstein4, In these works Ricoeur offers a narration about who and with whom he is,
has been, and seems to be going, thus a narration of his identity, though the line that
divides the man and the thinker is insistently maintained5.
In addition to these auto-biographical sketches, we have, scattered across Ricoeur's
oeuvre, a number of second-order reflections on the genre of autobiography itself. It is to
this properly philosophical treatments of the theme that I will focus in this paper by
reconstructing his rather scant and scattered remarks. Where one might have expected an
elaborate interrogation of this eminently modern literary genre in his trilogy Temps et récit
(hereafter TR), what we find instead is fairly modest: despite Ricoeur's mention of
'autobiography' more than a dozen times in roughly a thousand pages, and despite his
avowal that, «a systematic investigation of autobiography and self-portraiture would no
doubt attest to the in principle instability of narrative identity», he does not perform this
investigation here or elsewhere6. Even in his reflections on personal identity in Soi-même
comme un autre (hereafter SM)7, a work, emphatically concerned with the autos, what we
have is rather miserly on the theme of autobiography. This situation of relative indigence
has not, however, stopped at least one reviewer from seeing in SM an inchoative attempt at
autobiography8. Though such a reading is entirely unwarranted, it is helpful to see what he

Literature‖, 51, 2002, pp. 631-660, where Ricoeur states, «since I have no absolutely no taste for confession, I
have drawn a somewhat arbitrary line, effectively identifying my life with my intellectual life, one which is of
course not really true but which is something like my truth for others» (p. 634). François Dosse, who wrote a
biography of Ricoeur, gives an interesting account of his subject's utter reticence to speak about or be spoken
of in any personal way: «When I approached him about writing his biography, he made it clear that he did
not want to take part in the endeavour in any way. (...) The portrait that I sketched is thus one of a man I
never encountered. (...) Thus, I tried to write a biography which would correspond with the way Ricoeur
himself had understood the construction of personal identity», Le pari biographique. Écrire une vie, La
Découverte, Paris, 2005, p. 414 (for Dosse's biography cf. Paul Ricoeur, les sens d'une vie, La Découverte,
Paris, 1997). And Ricoeur, in the preface to La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli, Seuil, Paris, 2000, where he
describes, alongside public and professional preoccupations, the private preoccupation which gave rise to the
writing of the book, he speaks about himself not as a private man but in terms of his intellectual itinerary (p.
1).
4 Id. Vivant jusqu'à la mort suivi de Fragments, Seuil, Paris, 2007. It is in the fragments that we get closest

to the genre of the journal intime including the one on «Jacques Derrida» where Ricoeur considers his own
«ordinariness» and wonders how he, like any ordinary man, will be remembered, referring, as he often does
in these pages, to his confident hope that even those who leave no trace make a difference in God» (NB: All
translations are my own.)
5 This is in keeping with the imperative of the hybrid genre known as 'intellectual autobiography', whose most

early form might be said to be Aristotle's Protrepticus where the Philosopher describes the philosophical life,
albeit as an exhortation. Reading the latter in this way may allow us to go beyond Heidegger's famously
laconic biography of the Stagirite, «Aristotle was born, worked, and died», quoted in H. Arendt, The Life of
the Mind, Harcourt, New York, 1977, p. 220, n. 43.
6 Id., TR v. III, p. 358, emphasis added. The word 'autobiographie' and its cognate 'autobiographique'

appear nineteen times in TR, often preceded by the adjective 'pseudo-' or 'fictional' («fictive», «déguisée»),
as, for example, D. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe or M. Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. Ricoeur also
relates autobiography to the confessional genre and its device of «supposedly infallible memory», without,
however, dwelling on the puzzles of memory, something he does do elsewhere, though not in the context of a
discussion of autobiography (cf. La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli, pp. 67-111). This connection has been
explored by, for example, I. Calvino in his splendid autobiographical sketches in La strada di San Giovanni
(1990), as well as his essay on Mussolini's portraits in Eremita a Parigi, Pagine autobiografiche (1994),
where the fallible memory of the one who tries to remember his childhood is shown to be in a sense more
truthful than the prosthetically-fitted memory, held up by the crutch of the archive (pp. 136-163).
7 Id., Soi-même comme un autre, Seuil, Paris, 1990.
8 H. White, Guilty of History? The longue durée of Paul Ricoeur, in ―History and Theory‖, 46, 2007, pp. 233-

251. The biography by François Dosse (already quoted) does precisely what White mistakenly suggests SM
does, it writes a biography of the philosopher of narrative identity (see above, n. 3).

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says about autobiography in his sixth study9. Here Ricoeur takes up again the concluding
thoughts of TR, in particular what he called there the poetic response to the first aporia of
temporality: narrative identity10.
In order, then, to elaborate more synthetically Ricoeur's thoughts on autobiography, we
must look elsewhere. Happily, we have a most dramatically philosophical interrogation of
the genre or, at least, a genre with which, as we‘ve said, it bears a family resemblance in
one of his precious (because extremely rare) reflections on painting, his essay, Sur un
auto-portrait de Rembrandt11. While this essay provides neither a «systematic
investigation» of self-portraiture, nor an overt consideration of the «instability» of the
narrated self (le soi raconté), it does offer some valuable hints about what such an
investigation much look like, all the while resuming the force of the argument of SM—viz.,
that the self apprehends itself only through the detour of others. In order, then, to
approximate a theory of autobiography within and across Ricoeur's disparate remarks, we
will attempt to connect these two especially pregnant topoi: 1) his sporadic remarks on the
genre of autobiography, and 2) his analysis of the genre of self-portraiture through the
example of Rembrandt's 1660 autoportrait.
A fitting place to begin is the sole work published by Ricoeur that has the word
'autobiography' in its title, Réflexion faite, autobiographie intellectuelle (1995)12. Here,
before proceeding to tell the story of his thinking life, Ricoeur, good hermeneut that he is,
examines the genre itself. After noting the specific limitations the adjective 'intellectual'
places on the autobiographer, he goes on:
as for autobiography as such, I must be mindful of the snares and pitfalls of the genre. An autobiography
is first of all the story (récit) of a life. It is, at the same time, as it name suggests, a work of literature; in
this regard, it is based upon the gap (écart) created by retrospection between the daily unfolding of life
and the act of writing; this gap is what distinguishes an autobiography from a diary. Finally,
autobiography rests on the absence of any distance between the main character of the story who is oneself
and the narrator who says 'I' and writes in the first-person singular13.

Ricoeur points to three elements of autobiography. First, there is the fact that, above all,
an autobiography is a life story. Second, it is a mode of literary expression. And finally, in
autobiography, the main character, the narrator and the author coincide. Let us look more
closely at each of these elements, and their interrelations. The first and second elements
are in a sense at odds with each other, and their relation is precisely what is at stake in TR.
They are the poles of life and art, of art and life. Recall that Ricoeur's strategy therein—to
bracket the difficult question of reference until halfway through the third volume—was
occasioned by precisely this difficulty of articulating the interwoven references of history
and fiction, of life and art. What he called the first moment of mimesis, or «préfiguration»,
referred to those narrative capacities that already serve to link lived time with cosmological
time in our pre-narrative, quotidian experience. This is why we must ultimately give a
negative answer to the question he poses toward the end of volume three, as to whether
there are any experiences that are not already the fruits of narrative activity14. «Life in the
'raw' is beyond our reach for the very good reason that we are not born into a world of

9 P. Ricoeur, Le soi et l'identité narrative, in SM pp. 167-198.

10 Id., TR v. III, pp. 352-359.
11 Id., Lectures 3, Paris, Seuil, 1999, pp. 13-15. Since this essay has not appeared in English translation, the

following presentation will include a fairly in-depth paraphrase of these precious three pages.
12Id., Réflexion faite, autobiographie intellectuelle, Esprit, Paris, 1995.
13 Ivi, p. 11.
14 Y a-t-il, demandions-nous, une expérience qui ne soit pas déjà le fruit de l'activité narrative?, in P.

Ricoeur, TR , v. III, p. 357.

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children, but what, as unspeaking children, we come into a world already full of all our
predecessor' narratives»15.
Life is thus always languaged, and it is in language itself that the temporal resources of
narrative are contained, at least in a preliminary way such that our ability to use verb
tenses competently already bears witness to our ability to follow a story. Now, to say that
life is prefigured by the resources of narrative composition is not, of course, the same as
saying that our lives are made up. Ricoeur is emphatic about the truth intention that is at
the heart of all historical narration, which latter, as depending on the archived memory of
the «phase documentaire», includes the recounting of one's own past, that is, testimony
broadly construed. To be sure, aiming at the truth is not entirely absent from works of
fiction themselves and it is due to this quality of verisimilitude that, not only
autobiographical, but also fictional narratives are promising research tools for discerning
all sort of otherwise unrecorded historical data, from costumes and manners to weather
patterns. Clearly then, the interweaving of history and fiction, their overlapping
competences, are of central importance to any understanding of autobiography.
There are, however, important limits to the identification of art and life and it is these
that Ricoeur underlines here. He notes that, while life is lived, autobiographies are told,
recounted, written down. This is not to deny that much of quotidian life is spent in self-
examination, and thus in the activities of remembering and anticipating. The difference,
however, the gap that separates the diary from the autobiography, stems from the
structured, public character of the latter16. What these have in common, on the other hand,
is the last quality Ricoeur mentions here, a lack of distance between the narrator and the
main character. Ricoeur refers to this identity in other remarks on autobiography, always
citing P. Lejeune17, for whom what marks both autobiography and self-portraiture is a
«pacte autobiographique» through which we may assume «the identity of the name of the
author, the narrator, and the character»18. We will look more closely at Lejeune when we
turn to the paradoxes of looking at self-portraits. For now, we would like to point to the
last characteristic of autobiography Ricoeur mentions here, that the author, who is also the
narrator and main character, is said to speak in the first-person singular. This is not always
so clear-cut: like narrative identities, aren't autobiographies often spoken, at least in the
early going, in the first-person plural? Do we learn to say 'we' only after learning to say 'I'?
What these questions point to is the difficulty of ascription generally: who is said to be the
author of the composite action that is a life? In order to refine this line of questioning, let
us now turn to another place where Ricoeur addresses autobiography.
Ricoeur takes up this relationship of the narrator and their life in a section of SM
dealing with the act of recounting (raconter). To identify the one who recounts the story of
their own life with the self whose lived identity is narrated in interwoven stories is not,
however, without paradox. Is one the author of their enstoried life in the same way that

15 See Ricoeur's contribution to the roundtable discussion of the first volume of Temps et récit, published in
―Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa. University of Ottawa Quarterly‖, 1985, LV, 4, pp. 301-322.
16 This distance is not always maintained, and would seem to be only a matter of degree, since Ricoeur

mentions the diary, alongside autobiography, as types of «témoignages écrits». See P. Ricoeur, La mémoire,
l'histoire, l'oubli, p. 215. He also treats them together under the common heading of «reminders», see pp. 46-
47.
17 Cited in Id., TR v. III, p. 168 SM, p. 189 n. 1; La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli, p. 340 n. 45.
18 P. Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Seuil, Paris, 1975, pp. 23-24 (my translation). This equation

between the uncertainties that confront the viewer of self-portraits and the reader of autobiographical texts is
repeated in chapter 5 where Lejeune asks the very same question Ricoeur will ask, «What makes a self-
portrait recognizable as such?» They agree that there is no sign internal to a self-portrait which would enable
us to say it is not a mere portrait, to which Lejeune offers the ambitious thesis that perhaps painting cannot
use the first person.

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they can be the author of their autobiography?19 The point is not so much to stress the
artificial character of the latter, its being made and thus, in a sense, more on the side of the
voluntary than the former, which is our story only be being informed, even spoken, by
others, including nature, since the self of narrative identity is always in a relation to the
absolute involuntary of the facticity of existence. As O. Marquard likes to say, «we human
beings are always more our accidents than our accomplishments»20. We are not the
authors or initiators of our lives, we do not choose to come to be, though we do choose to
write our life story.
These gaps separating the narrated and narrating self from the subject and author of
autobiography are already evident in certain expressions Aristotle uses to describe the
relation between an agent and his action. Ricoeur, reflecting on this, takes most of these
statements from the Ethics, though he does refer to the Physics as well, in part in order to
show how the operation of ascription takes place at the intersection of description and
prescription. The first way of articulating this juncture is that of the relation between an
understanding of the agent as principle or cause and at the same time as being the
progenitor, thus the metaphorical linkage between action and parenthood. The second is
that of being the master (kyrios) of an action «from beginning to end». The third way of
«indirectly approaching» the paradoxical ascription of an action to an agent, is through the
notion of shared responsibility (synaition), a word coined by Aristotle to describe how we
are, along with nature, co-responsible for our dispositions and virtues21. What is at stake
here is the consistency of the notion of agency itself, of the responsible subject, especially
in the face of the explosion of this concept due to modern technology 22. But these
paradoxes of agency are at the heart of the discordant concordance that is the self and they
are equally evident for the one writing their own life. So for example, the question of where
to begin an autobiography, that is, whether my life story ought to include events I do not
remember such as my birth, or those of my parents, even my ancestors. Surely these are
important parts of my life story. Even still, if autobiography must face this problem of
beginning, of choosing a starting point, a year zero, it is still no less important for the living
self narrating her identity23. One difference, however, between narrating oneself to oneself
and doing so for others, in public, communicatively, is simply that we cannot
straightforwardly say that the self is the author of her life in the same way or to the same
extent as the narrator is the author of her autobiography. We could go back even further in
Ricoeur's writings and consider whether the 'autos' of the signature or auto-graph is
helpful here, though he had very early criticized the study of handwriting in the same vein

19 Cf. Id., SM, p. 189: «Quand je m'interprète dans les termes d'un récit de vie, suis-je à la fois les trois,
comme dans le récit autobiographique? Narrateur et personnage, sans doute, mais d'une vie dont, à la
différence des êtres de fiction, je ne suis pas l'auteur, mais au plus, selon le mot d'Aristote, le coauteur, le
synaition».
20 This is the underlying principle of his «usualism». Cf. In Defense of the Accidental, R. Wallace (tr.), Oxford

University Press, 1991, p. 3.

21 It is too bad that Ricoeur, who elsewhere insists on the interconnections between the voluntary and the

involuntary, does not here recall another well-known Aristotelian expression of this co-responsibility, one
which has as its content the generative sense he mentions. In book II of the Physics, where the generation of
men is being discussed, Aristotle, thinking no doubt of the orderly nature of the cosmos, says that «man
creates man, with the help of the sun» (anthrôpos anthôpon genna kai hèlios) (194 b 13). The forgetting of
this principle is the basis of Rémi Brague's critique of modernity. Cf. Les ancres dans le ciel, Seuil, Paris,
2011, p. 114.
22 Cf. P. Ricoeur, Le concept de responsabilité, in Le Juste, Esprit, Paris, 1995, pp. 41-70, where Ricoeur,

following Hans Jonas, speaks of the long-term extension of the effects of our technologically-mediated
actions and the idea of the « une responsabilité illimitée» (p. 68).
23 Examining these questions with the help of Maurice Halbwachs, Ricoeur remarks on the «style quasi

autobiographique» of the latter's early writing on the subject. Cf. La mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli, p. 147.

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as ethology: that it treats human beings as replaceable, as non-unique, as types, or at least

it remains too much on the side of the involuntary24.
Now, it is precisely this element of the involuntary that is almost suppressed in (fictional
and non-fictive) autobiography. Ricoeur shows this with respect to the question of
beginning by considering Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. The first words are
spoken by the narrator-character-pseudo-autobiographer, «longtemps, je me suis couché
de bonne heure». We do not, of course, begin our lives speaking. What, then, Ricoeur asks,
can this «longtemps» do, how does it function, if not by pointing to an almost indifferent
and immemorial past that is hinted at in the beginning of a narrative. (One can say the
same of the end, that, unlike lives, autobiographies must end their narrative at some
arbitrary point, a point of their own choosing.) In any case, what the «longtemps» suggests
is that one's life can be taken up as a whole and recounted, which is precisely what cannot
be done in the case of our life-histories. Ricoeur makes the point very clearly:
Indeed, nothing in real life has the same function as the narrative commencement; memory loses itself in
the mists of early childhood; my birth, and even more emphatically, the act whereby I was conceived,
belong more to the history of others, of my parents, than to me. As for my death, it figures as a recounted
event only in the stories of those who survive me25.

So the problem of birth, of beginning, points to one of the chief difficulties of

autobiography: that of precisely demarcating the extension of its subject. We are never
more than coauthors of our lives and coagents of our actions—and in this sense, Aristotle's
use of the metaphor of 'parent' is significant since birth, and, more obviously, conception
itself, are always matters of partnership. Technology has in fact removed the stricture that
a child be born of only two people and one might indeed ask whether the technologies of
birth, their technicians and machines, ought to be included within the sphere of the autos
of autobiography, and narrative identity, something B. Latour's 'actor-network theory'
would take to be a matter of course. They would no doubt make for interesting and rather
novel family portraits if these were to include IVF instruments, technicians, etc. This idea
is not really that far-fetched. Indeed, for the subject of narrative identity, where one is born
is an often significant fact, not only in the sense of being a natural-born citizen, but in the
sense of belonging to a place, a people, a geography, a history. Even more than being born
somewhere in the sense of a country and thus a nationality, we can talk about being born
in a certain house or hospital, a seemingly insignificant fact made especially meaningful in
the autobiographies of especially rural people, many of whom are born and die in the same
place, the same room, and, at the limit, the same bed. But we can also move concentrically
outward from our inhabited space, in the manner of Joyce's main character: «Stephen
Daedalus / Class of Elements / Clongowes Wood College / Sallins / County Kildare /
Ireland/ The World / The Universe»26. It is this ability to imaginatively vary the places of
our belonging that marks the limit of any definitive sense of autochthony.
So we have seen some paradoxes of autobiography, and how the overlap with and
divergence from the instabilities of narrative identity. This in principle instability is well
attested for us by the photographs we possess of ourselves at different ages, where we see
the emergence and disappearance of certain styles, postures, pastimes, even certain habits
that can be read off our bodies. With the help of these portraits we are able to time-travel,
to see ourselves as others, as coming to be who we are and also of not becoming the
possibilities inscribed in our past. Nobody, it would seem, is more familiar with this
process of making visible our coming-to-be than the self-portraitist, and there are few

24 Id., Le Volontaire et l'involontaire, p. 344 ff.

25 Id., SM, pp. 189-190.
26 J. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Viking, New York, 1964, p. 15.

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painters in the history of art who have given us more evidence of such self-examination
than Rembrandt van Rijn. It is thus to the coincidence of this painter with a philosopher
who, perhaps more than any other, posed the question of self-narration, that we now turn,
that is, to Ricoeur's searching examination of the Dutch master examining himself.
Ricoeur begins his rumination on one of Rembrandt's self-portraits (1660) with a
problem we have already seen: just as I must, in reading an autobiography, posit an
identity between the author, narrator, and main character, I must, when looking at a self-
portrait, posit an identity between the one who paints and the one painted. But what
exactly is it that allows the viewer to posit such a relation between the signature and the
person painted, the painter and what is sometimes called the 'sitter', (even, curiously, in
those cases where the sitter is standing)? What distinguishes them is the difference that
separates the active and the passive. The sitter sits, rests, remains. The painter, on the
other hand, paints, and disappears into the painting. Many self-portraits try to lessen this
distance by painting the painter painting. This, however, can lead to confusion: that the
subject of a portrait is painted brush-in-hand cannot, without fail, be taken as an internal
sign that the subject is the same as the painter27. Even still there is the mediation of the
mirror, which, too, is often depicted. P. Lejeune dedicates a chapter to the puzzles
generated by Norman Rockwell's famous Triple Self-Portrait (1960) in which the author
identifies the three possible degrees of the portrait: the stylized, thus anonymized, typified
portrait on the canvas; the painter painting seen in the mirror; the artist from behind,
painting and looking in the mirror28. The third of these is rather interesting for it returns
us right back into the thicket of perplexities of agency. But it adds another dimension as
well: that we are seen, that we are, in the description of man offered by Hans Blumenberg,
the being with the most back29. How does Rockwell see his back in order to paint it? Does
he simply paint his own back by painting another's, some other body's back? Or is the back
made visible by elaborately mirroring mirrors? Is my back just a generic back, joined to my
specific front? The passage through the other is thus not only necessary to circumvent the
limit of cannot see, what we can see only obliquely.
Indeed, just as our lives are already prefigured by narrative competence, so also is the
self-portrait always, at least in part, a representation of the history of the genre itself. This
is made evident in Rockwell's painting since, along with the three self-portraits, we find,
affixed to the margin of his internal canvas, four well-known self-portraits: Dürer,
Rembrandt, Picasso, Van Gogh. These, however, are no longer first-level self-portraits;
since Rockwell had to copy them, they are his own imitation of those great artists
representing themselves. What is more, they are, rather conspicuously, and like many
examples of the genre, nothing more than heads. In fact, Lejeune notes that, in his
comparison of self-portraiture with portraiture in the Uffizi, the former are almost all
males, while the latter are split fifty-fifty; portraits depicting a female subject are much
more likely to be nudes and where men are nude, they are invariably painted as torsos 30.

27 P. Lejeune gives the example of Frans Hals' Portrait of a Painter (ca. 1650) which was at one time
mistaken for a self-portrait, ch. 5.
28 There are historical precedents for the triple self-portrait, the first I know of being from Johannes Gump

(1646). For a discussion of this painting and the light it sheds on portraiture itself, see Jean-Luc Nancy, Le
Regard du portrait, Galilée, Paris, 2001.
29 H. Blumenberg, Beschreibung des Menschen, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, 2006.
30 P. Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, p. 118. Lejeune poses an interesting question about the possibility

of what will come to be known as the 'selfie': «what could the self-portrait be in photography?» (115). One
thing is certain: photography has ended the relative monopoly that male subject have in self-portraiture. A
further answer to Lejeune's question can be found by considering the film stills of photographer Cindy
Sherman. Are these self-portraits? Here we might say, that though the author and narrator are Sherman, the
character is not so much Sherman as art history, or woman in art history: thus they are autobiographical
only to the extent that we describe ourselves as types, portraits of a lady. Going even further, we might at the

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Having laid out some of the challenges of the genre of self-portraiture itself, and having
seen how these overlap with autobiography, let us return to Ricoeur's questions: how do I
know that the face I look at is the face of the painter himself? Whence do I glean this fact?
This point, of course, is that it is not immediately apparent, that a person's name is not
written on their face. Indeed, there is nothing on the tableau itself that allows the viewer to
draw a necessary link between the face they see and the signature they read. In other
words, to the extent that I can say that I am looking at a self-portrait, I must depend on
what the French language very aptly calls la légende—the didactic panel which is so
important to the modern museum experience. Without this I would not know that this is
anything other than a portrait, since all I can glean from the signature is the painter's
name, not the name of the person depicted. Thus, if I am to posit a relation of identity
between the signature and the face, I must move outside the space delimited by the frame;
I must appeal to the biography of the painter, to the facts of his life, and to his attestation
of a self-portrait painted at this time. In other words, I must appeal to or pass through
something like the alienation of objectivity, in this case the assurance attested to by the
institutions of what Arthur Danto famously called «the artworld»31.
Now, if this description of the operation by which we are able to ascribe the prefix
'auto-' to a portrait sounds a great deal like the «detour by way of the other» that Ricoeur
outlines elsewhere, it is not by accident: indeed, Ricoeur's short reflection on Rembrandt's
self-portrait is dated 1987, precisely the same period in which Ricoeur wrote the later
studies of SM. What makes self-portraiture so interesting for Ricoeur, especially since he
was writing in the heyday of the «death of the author», and had long reflected on
structuralism, is the fact that we cannot, in the face of such works, maintain the asceticism
that had become an imperative of art as much as literary criticism. This enjoins us to
approach a work from a purely aesthetic or literary point of view, and therefore hold in
suspension any information about the flesh and blood artist or author, letting the
orphaned work alone plead its cause. But, since self-portraiture cannot be guaranteed as
such without some aid from psychobiographical data, such asceticism must always and in
principle be prescinded from. Indeed, in order to identify the flesh and blood artist with
the person represented, the viewer must consider his age, his life situation, his personal
triumphs and tragedies since these inform the expression with which the painter gazes out
from the canvas. Furthermore, in a more painterly register, the viewer must also consider,
within the overall style of the painter, the phase of experimentation he engaged in at that

same time ask whether Mary Pratt's hyperrealist paintings of preserves, e.g., Red Currant Jelly (1972), or
Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998) ought to be considered as quasi-autoportraits. Do not these intimate objects
accomplish the precise detour through objectivity that Ricoeur finds constitutive of self-identity. Aren't the
objects among which we live, and even our habitats, something like quasi-habits? As Lejeune has pointed
out, the majority of self-portraits are clothed, many very suggestively, as with Rembrandt's 1658 self-portrait
in which he wears an orientalizing fabric, one which has much the same effect as that adorning the Dutch
master's Aristotle as he contemplates a bust of Homer (readers of Ricoeur are no doubt familiar with the
image if for no other reason than that it adorns the cover of the Points edition of the his Lectures 1, Seuil,
Paris, 1999). Are the clothes worn by the subjects of autobiography part of their stories, even of their selves?
Surely they must be taken into account in the sitter's self expression. Indeed, the adage holds here no less
than in any other situation, that 'the clothes make the man.' The naked emperor is no emperor. This
possibility, announced by these limit-cases, of admitting objects into the subject position of auto-portraiture
and even autobiography, is beautifully attested to in the opening pages of Adalbert Stifter's masterpiece, Die
Mappe meines Urgroßvaters (1841). It is, in fact, already evident from the epigraph: Dulce est, inter
majorium versari habitacula et veterum dicta factaque recensere memoria. A rough paraphrase might be:
«Sweet it is to spend time among the things with which our ancestors' dwelt, [things that help us] review in
memory their words and deeds».
31 Though Ricoeur was familiar with Danto's work on action, he did not, as far as I know, address Danto‘s

writings on aesthetics from which this term is drawn. Cf. A. Danto, The Artworld, in ―Journal of Philosophy‖,
1964, 61, pp. 571-584.

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time. Thus, biographical details must be held together with visual analysis, «I have no
other resource to breach the gap between the signature and the legend» (supplied, of
course, by another)32. In this sense, we must retrace the stages of the self-portraitist
himself, think of him looking in the mirror, using his specular double as an image,
scrutinizing his own face, and bringing to bear the resources of chiaroscuro on the clarity
an obscurity of the self itself. The painter, painting himself, must examine himself, and it is
the result of this self-examination that is witnessed by the self-portrait. And it is in the face
of this face that we must note a possible difference between self-portraiture and
autobiography: the self-portrait looks back at its viewer, it seems to look at us as we look at
it; the reader of the autobiography does not seem to have any parallel experience. But in
fact this is less of a difference than it seems: the world of the text and the world of the
reader do intersect at the level of refiguration, where the possibilities of the latter serve to
open up, in some sense, possibilities in the latter. The truth intention animating both
autobiography and self-portraiture, their properly historical or representative character,
demands that the world the author writes about not only existed, it is in some sense the
very same as our own. When life goes in search of its history, that is, when one attempts to
narrate their identity, it finds others' identities in the form of living narratives, but also
autobiographies and self-portraits.
We are, as Ricoeur has stressed, not born into a world of children but rather come,
unspeaking, into a world of speakers, and of those who have spoken, in other words, one
already full of the stories of those who have come before us33. It is in this sense that life
must search for its history, and we borrow from others the fruits of their searchings. This is
paralleled in the gesture by which we read Rembrandt's name onto his face, transposing it
from the légende, itself the distillation of many testimonies, documents, and archives.
We would like to conclude by briefly reviewing what we have found. We began by
recalling an unfulfilled project announced by Ricoeur, that «a systematic investigation of
autobiography and self-portraiture would no doubt attest to the in principle instability of
narrative identity». We sought to trace this testimony of instability across Ricoeur's
scattered remarks on autobiography and self-portraiture. What we found were a number of
paradoxes concerning the relationship between life and art, history and fiction, beginning
and ending, speaking about oneself and being spoken (of), authoring and being authored,
attesting to oneself and being attested. What each of these paradoxes involve are the ways
that our identities are necessarily and essentially incomplete, and this is due to the fact
that these puzzles can never satisfactorily be sorted out; indeed, their constitutive
incompletion is the reason for the dynamic nature of ipseity. Thus, in spite of their
differences, the narrated subject, like the subjects of autobiography and self-portraiture,
cannot say who they are, cannot truly be themselves, without the mediation of others,
whether in the form of those close to us, the collectivities to which we belong, or the
possible future story of humanity as a collective singular.

32 P. Ricoeur, Lectures 3, p. 14.

33 ―Revue de l'Université d'Ottawa. University of Ottawa Quarterly‖, 1985, LV, 4, p. 319.

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