Who is the Self? Thin Selves, Narrative and the Limits of Sense

The ontological and ethical status of the self is a matter of intense contemporary debate. Within that debate the narrative account of the self is often critiqued for allegedly commit-ting a petitio principi: to narrate itself the self must already be, therefore to understand the self narratively is already to assume what needs to be shown. Narrative identity in such a view is at best epiphenomenal: it is based upon a more fundamental self-relation. Similar-ly, it is argued that narrative conceals fundamental discontinuities in the self, limits of ex-perience that are both constitutive of the self and yet resist incorporation into narrative structures. In thinking Ricurs work today, and in particular with a view to its future, the present contribution will approach his account of the narrative self through reflection on what Dan Zahavi has termed the thin self and also on those experiences that seem to challenge both narrative and thin accounts of the self. Those latter experiences, it will be argued disclose the selfs dependence upon and vulnerability to that which remains foreign to it.