ABSTRACT
Questioning the inflections of the "biographical condition" and the transformations affecting in return the processes of biography at the time of the "biographical society", this article shows how the narrative of the self is today experiencing a revolution in its status parallel to that affecting the relationship between the individual and the social. The social uses that are made of the biographical narrative in the societies of advanced modernity contribute in fact to constituting it into a public act and to developing an externalized and objectivizing institutional practice. These transformations of the narrative of the self must be rewritten within the broader framework of the societal evolutions of the last forty years. It is in this broader perspective that the paradoxical stakes of the injunction to tell oneself, which seems to be one of the characteristics of our contemporary society, will be illuminated.
Keywords:
Biographical condition; Biography process; Biographical society; Self-tale; Biographical capital