Du Pareil au Même. De deux identités et de trois doubles

The purpose of this paper is to examine two conflicting conceptions of identity: the first, trivial, is actually a scholarly term specific to formal logic; the second one, which we will call naïve, is revealed to us through ordinary language, including fiction. Utterances often appear fuzzy from a logical point of view – that is to say if we consider their truth value; hence their flexibility and ability to adapt to contexts which do not fulfil truth conditions, i.e. they cannot be reduced to a true vs false binary opposition, and thus they contradict the principle of the excluded third. This claim is striking for the apparently contradictory statements of identity like: The room was, yet was not mine (The lost room, Fitz James O’Brien). To conclude, we will study among other cases of duplication, the famous but Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde to see precisely how common language used in fiction enables us to grasp and represent this kind of experience about personal identity – knowing that identity is largely made up of identifications.