Vem är du? Förundran som forskningsmetod

Abstract

This article is an attempt to apply Luce Irigaray’s notions of difference and the other as the methodological attitude in reading narrative or autobiographical interview data. According to Irigaray, to communicate with the other as truly different requires that we keep wondering about the other and that we speak in a language which does not presume a shared world or a common linguistic code. Instead, the way – or method – of love speaks a poetic language of rhythm and melody of the one who is speaking to the other. From the encounter between two persons, both turn back to themselves, and their identities are in the continuous state of becoming when they move between themselves and the time-space where they meet. In this article, the researcher meets with a physician she has interviewed for the purposes of her study on general practitioners’ identity. She starts her analysis with her own feeling of wonder, and she speaks to the physician while moving back to her own self and asking what she could become thanks to the narrative words given to her by the interviewee. She then asks what the motives are for scientific writing in the language of love and, further, what can be said about the cultural origins of personal narrative and professional identity if their analysis is based on the not-shared, the mysterious, the negativity of not knowing.