By following Ricoeur's perspective, this article aims to show how the dialectic of vulnerability and effort constitutes the person's emancipatory driving force. The author starts from a confrontation between Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricœur's philosophies of the human being, deepening the various stages in order to reinterpret the initial idea that we are born an individual, whereas becoming a person is a process that goes through an interrelational and cultural dialectis. It is from this

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... ctive, which more so than others reveals a significant proximity between Ricœur and Levinas, that the idea of identity as a hermeneutical path of emancipation reveals its dimension of ethical challenge. That ethical challenge concerns, on the one hand, the relationship between passivity/vulnerability and subjective powers, and, on the other hand, the relationship between the capacity to be recognised by others and the will to progress with them through the challenges of mutual recognition.