Towards a critique of narrative reason
(2013) Law and Humanities — Vol. 7, n° 1, p. 55-67 (2013)
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- This paper aims to rehabilitate the role of narrative, against the dominant strategy of thinking, which disqualifies it. We have grown up with stories, which makes this plea easy: they are all around, nurturing us and arousing general sympathy amongst the doxa. But at the same time, the prevailing doctrine tends to discredit narrative, presenting it as private and frivolous in order to constrain its powers. I would like to demonstrate the constitutive nature of narrative both as the collective story, memory and history of peoples, and as the individual or 'personal novel' each one of us tells himself in order to create his own identity. I analyse the repression and disqualifications of narrative, before revealing the ways in which both theoretical and practical reason arise from within our narrative imagination. This conception of the human as homo fabulans (or story-telling animal) could lead us to outline a 'Critique of Narrative Reason'.
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Ost, F. (2013). Towards a critique of narrative reason. Law and Humanities, 7(1), 55-67. https://doi.org/10.5235/17521483.7.1.55 (Original work published 2013)