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

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.