L’identité : un paradoxe entre rationalité et imaginaire

The paper explores various meanings of the notion of identity, the individual and collective contexts in which it applies, the questions and the problems it raises. Its scope is to build a cartography of the different approaches adopted by the participants in the 4th Congress of the Centre International de Recherches sur l’Imaginaire, dedicated to self-images and self-representations. The main idea is that identity is situated between rationality and imagination, between an objective reality and an unlimited fantasy, which is the cause of its paradoxical usages.