Accepted Panels

      During an immersion with French infantry soldiers, it was possible to accompany them in all their activities for a little over a year. Thanks to the data from participant observations and especially thanks to the semi-directive interviews about their military life stories, it was possible to work around the question of their life rhythms. It emerged that they do not really live in a temporal continuum that allows them to construct their lives as a continuous reality in time. It has been observed that they make their autobiography thanks to the sum of the spaces in which they have lived (more or less long) with a defined objective. They live each time in a continuous present, then transit to another space where they live again in a continuous present. No temporal coherence is necessary because their goals never depend on the past they have lived and will not really affect what their life will be like afterwards.

    They do not approach risk based on what history has shown to be a risk, what they have learned to be a risk, what they know about their potential enemies. They construct risk according to what they know - in real time - to be a threat or an obstacle to the implementation of their orders of action in the world in which they operate. I propose here to discuss how they reconstruct their identity and their notion of self in order to construct categories of otherness in order to think about the risks and threats that surround them without ever having recourse to the past or the future in order to react always according to the situation at hand.