To consent and to narrate life

Abstract

The following article examines two manner of understandings life that Ricoeur develops in two different moments of his work: the first moment corresponds to a philosophy of the will developed during the decade of the 50^th and the second corresponds to a hermeneutics of the texts that Ricoeur develops particularly in his trilogy Temps et récit. My thesis is that the different discourses that Ricoeur has elaborated about life, phenomenological and hermeneutical, are marked by the idea of affirmation, that is, by the potency of a self that overcomes the different figures of negativity. Then, we can make sense of the title of Ricoeur posthumous work Living Up to Death. Consent and narrate are two ways to affirm despite its opacity and negativity.