Deleuze and Ricoeur: Disavowed Affinities and the Narrative Self (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy, 91)

Scholarly studies consider Paul's views on leadership tend to fall into one of three camps: 1) the historical development view, which in large measure identifies developments in church practice with developments in Pauline and deutero-Pauline ecclesiology; 2) the synchronic, historical reconstruction, typically making use of Graeco-Roman, social context sources, or social-scientific modelling, focusing on a single congregation, and sometimes distinguishing between the situation to which Paul was responding and the pattern he sought to impose; and 3) the theological/hermeneutical analysis, identifying Paul's particular approach to power and authority, often independently of any detailed reconstruction of the situations to which Paul was responding. Andrew Clarke has explored in an earlier work, Serve the Community of the Church (Eerdmans, 2000), the distinctive, local and historical situations in the various Pauline communities and concluded that there is no evidence that they organised themselves according to a common set of governmental structures which clearly developed with the passage of time. Rather each community was influenced by its own localized, social and cultural context. The present project builds on this, and necessarily focuses on leadership style rather than church order. It seeks to recover from Paul's critical responses, his generic ethos of church leadership, including the ideal qualities, characteristics and task of leaders and the nature of appropriate interaction and engagement with church members. In the light of current, theoretical discussions about power and gender, the study focuses particularly on Paul's attitude towards hierarchy, egalitarianism, authority, responsibility and privilege. Why Deleuze and Ricoeur? Fields for potential and possible connectors Investigative strategies Towards the cohesion of a life : chapter outline Problematizing the field of the self Between rigidification and dehiscence : context and counter-context Ancestry for the self in a problematic field Conceptual personae and the self Aporia of the inscrutability of the self Sweeney : philosophical bathyscope Critique on the kantian self Pretensions of the kantian self Divided self still surrounded by the mad and the replicant The narrative self Oneself as another or onselves as myself The narrative self : origins in Kant Appearance and exposition of the narrative self Working through narrative Towards an interrogation of the narrative self Questioning the narrative self through its progenitors Methodology : questioning back The narrative self in retrospect The poetic composition of the self : threefold mimesis Summary : problems for narrative identity Transversals between Ricoeur and Deleuze In the land of the larval selves Origins in Schelling Ontology of productivity The dogmatic image of thought The narrative self as twin multiplicities Dissolving the narrative self From multiplicity to the narrative self Obscure stammering for a new narrative self Between time and the self : a fractured I Laws in the germplasm of narrative : the dark precursor Narrative persona From debt to excess Ricoeur's dilemma of the self : substance or illusion? Deleuze and Aristotle : a disavowed affinity Interzone Between dark precursor and narrative self : gelassenheit Inhering problems for the becoming-narrative self An unguessed axis for narrative selves From excess to debt : evolving constraints to narrative identity Where to start, three stations : natality, personhood, narrative selfhood First constraint : proustian love and lack Narrative constraints : implications for the synthesis of the heterogeneous The poetic imagination within the evolving constraints of narrative productivity Where Deleuze was, there Ricoeur shall be? The narrative self : a badly posed question Second constraint : imagination within structure and obligation A self entombed in a debt to the past. What is the self? Is it the impregnable cogito of Descartes or the shattered self of Nietzsche? Or has it become serendipitously constituted from pieces of fairy tales and novels, childhood comics and soap operas - a multitude of forces culled from fashion, modern myth, culture and recreation? Or must we still convince ourselves, like Rousseau, that the self can never be tainted; that it is, above all else, irrefrangible? Paul Ricoeur proposed that the self is formed within the narratives we tell of ourselves, that it is itself a form of narrative. But is this enough? Could a self cohere in a multitude of potential narratives or find unity among its stories? In this book, Declan Sheerin challenges the theory that the self is narrative alone or that concordance reigns over discordance in the self. Drawing upon the works of Gilles Deleuze, he proposes that deep to the sense of a unified, represented self is a more fundamental self of difference, a self that is more than merely coherent narrative.