Bogoslovska smotra, Vol. 81 No. 2, 2011.
Preliminary communication
Testimonio as an Art and Strategy of Narrative Identity: Ricoeur's Hermeneutics of Testimony and the Question of Conversion of Former Drug Addicts
Srđan Sremac
; VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Abstract
The theme of this paper is the act and the analysis of testimonies of conversion on the basis of Ricoeur's hermeneutic of testimonies. The paper offers an examination of the different contexts in which the expression »testimony« is used and compares its different meanings and definitions. The second part summarizes Ricoeur's contribution to the philosophy of testimonies. Finally, the third part treats some of Ricoeur's insights as a means for analysing the narratives of conversion of former addicts. If we understand addiction as a special psychological illness — and an illness that, in a hermeneutical sense, is also a demonstrable problem of establishing one's own narrative identity (in terms of continuity, the relationship between the past, the present and the future) — conversion can, precisely through its influence on (re)forming a narrative identity, influence its articulation, thus also indirectly reassessing the relationship between oneself and others. A testimony in this sense is understood precisely as the articulation of one's own narrative identity, more exactly as a kind of promise to oneself that was, in the addictive situation, questionable. In this paper, conversion is understood to be complete, unique, and above all, an existential phenomenon, which includes the acceptance of a new rhetoric, linguistic transformation and biographical reconstruction.
Keywords
Paul Ricoeur; testimony; hermeneutics; conversion; identity; narrative; discourse; addiction
Hrčak ID:
69793
URI
Publication date:
28.6.2011.
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