Deleuze and Ricoeur: Disavowed Affinities and the Narrative Self

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.

A highly original analysis of Paul Ricoeur's 'narrative self', specifically in relation to the philosophy of difference articulated by Gilles Deleuze, thus bringing together two giants of twentieth-century Continental philosophy for the first time.

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.

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.

Preface1. Introduction to an Enigma2. Problematizing the Field of the Self3. Critique on the Kantian Self4. The Narrative Self5. Questioning the Narrative Self through its Progenitors6. Interlude7. In the Land of the Larval Selves8. Dis/solving the Narrative Self9. From Debt to Excess10. Interzone11. From Excess to Debt: Evolving Constraints to Narrative Identity12. The Poetic Imagination within the Evolving Constraints of Narrative Productivity13. ConclusionBibliographyIndex