Iconicity and Autobiography from the Philosophical Project of Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

In “Sur un autoportrait de Rembrandt,” Paul Ricoeur works on the identity of the Dutch painter by analyzing a self-portrait from 1660. The fact that Ricoeur addresses “writing as a chapter in a general theory of iconicity,” leads to understanding him in a similar way to which W. J. T. Mitchell proposes reading Jacques Derrida: as “a philosopher of the graphic version of the pictorial turn.” According to this perspective, on the one hand, iconicity would become an irreducible dimension of self-understanding. On the other hand, in Rembrandt's self-portrait of 1660, the “real” author, after dissolving into the “unreal” character he portrayed, created the necessary distance so that, as a spectator, he could examine himself autobiographically thanks to objectifying himself in his mirror image. And in this analysis of the self by himself, he would become, according to the criteria established by Ricoeur, a self (soi, Selbst, ipse) capable of living a life worth living. If the argument is consistent, our hypothesis is that the “narrative identity”, long worked on by Ricoeur, would be subordinate to, as well as complementary to, what we call here the “iconic identity”.