Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body

Book excerpt: Paul Ricoeur and the Lived Body extends the scope of Paul Ricoeur’s reflections and analyses of the body as one’s own through explorations into the ethical, cultural, and affective dimensions of our corporeal existence. Starting with the fact that each of us has a place in the world by reason of our mode of incarnation as flesh, the contributors to this volume address a range of diverse themes in which the lived body figures. Edited by Roger W. H. Savage, this book investigates the construction of narrative identities and the social assignment of gender and race, the passions and an ethics of respect, affect theory, feeling, the carnal imagination, and the cultural and social milieu that comprises the conditions of our embodiment as subjects who have deeply held convictions and beliefs. By acknowledging that the lived body is irreducible to an object in the world, the essays in this volume have a common point: our assurance in acting and suffering is rooted in the mode of our incarnate existence as fragile yet capable human beings.