To Be Alive, to Have a Life. Note for a Narrative Clarification of the Concept of Life in Biology. Posthumous Dialogue with John Stewart

Declerck Gunnar
Language of the article : French
DOI: n/a
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This short text, partly biographical, was written on the occasion of the seminar in tribute to John Stewart held on 8-9 July 2021 at the University of Technology of Compiègne. It does not have the qualities of form or the pledges of scientificity that one can usually expect from a research article and is more like an essay than a finished product. It can be read as the start of a dialogue that will no longer take place. I defend, starting from a critical analysis of the model of autopoiesis – which was one of the leading theoretical references of John Stewart –, that the biological concept of life is inseparable from the biographical concept of life, that the being alive – as much in the act of recognition of the living that inaugurates the biologist’s investigation, as in the naive attitude towards the living – is first of all apprehended as an having a life, and that a biology which would like – as John Stewart, not without vehemence, encouraged it – to clarify its object should consider the narrative structure that presides over the apparition of the living, all life being, as Paul Ricœur held, a narrated life.



Pour citer cet article :

Declerck Gunnar (2022/1). To Be Alive, to Have a Life. Note for a Narrative Clarification of the Concept of Life in Biology. Posthumous Dialogue with John Stewart. In Lenay Charles (Eds), John Stewart: Tribute/Legacy/Debate, Intellectica, 76, (pp.57-69), DOI: n/a.