Loci in Law and Literature

Chapters 12 and 13 further the project of developing our thoughts on a hermeneutics of selfhood by turning to the bond of law, literature and technology, in order to illuminate the questions arising from Ricoeur's distinction between ipse and idem. Modern technology brings a variety of challenges to the physical aspects of our idem, which may affect not only our legal idem in the sense of legal personhood but also our ipse. As a consequence, it affects our ability to make sense of technology when it comes to narrating ourselves, as well as being able to acknowledge alterity and to do justice.

Ricoeur explains the dialogical constitution of the self as identity – selfhood and legal personhood – as one mode of thought on justice. The other mode is the philosophical inquiry into the way in which the predicates that qualify human actions in terms of morality are hierarchically constituted in institutional forms, such as, for example, the scope of criminal responsibility, the duty of care, or the good neighbour principle. The just is situated at the intersection of the two modes. To Ricoeur, this means that, ‘the self only constitutes its identity through a relational structure that places the dialogical dimension above the monological’. Obviously, there is always a distance between me and the other. In the dialogue of friends, the other is you. On the plane of justice, law as an institution mediates human relations so that the other is anyone, as in Ulpian's definition of law, as noted in Chapter 11. If a being is able to narrate its ipse identity adequately, this enhances its options to fully achieve the idem identity of legal personhood, and, with it, the rights-and-duties-bearing consequences. After all, what matters for success in law is mutual recognition. What the prosecutor said in the case of a slave girl against whom a criminal charge was brought exemplifies this notion, at least if we take him literally: ‘I cannot prove more plainly that the prisoner is a person … than to ask your honors to look at her. There she is.’