The paper aims to explain how Paul Ricœur’s phenomenological and hermeneutic approach offers an original theory of the self as self-attestation. Considering useful an approach that combines the psychological uses of the notion of self with a reflection on one’s capacity to design himself/herself as a person, the paper offers a thorough analysis of Ricœur’s work Soi-même comme un autre / Oneself as Another. The main purpose of this analysis is to highlight that, drawing a clear distinction between two forms (...) of identity (la mêmeté/sameness and l’ipséité/selfhood) and proposing a dialectic between the self and the other, Ricœur grounds his theory on a notion of self which includes one’s acceptance of the other. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to analyze the philosophical problem of just and unjust memory. There is a general consensus about commemorating fallen soldiers and killed civilians. But, unfor...

Monotheism of reason & heart, polytheism of imagination and art: That is what we need!Even today aesthetics is not considered among Edmund Husserl’s main interests. It is true, however, that there are many other phenomenological approaches to aesthetics among his “heretic” disciples, as Ricoeur calls them. I am thinking here especially of Sartre’s L’Imagination and L’imaginaire, Roman Ingarden’s Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst and Das literarische Kunstwerk, and Mikel Dufrenne’s Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique. Nevertheless, it may be objected that in (...) regard to Husserl’s work in aesthetics, research has been, at times, limited or simplified. Though... (shrink)

En este artículo se examinarán algunas intersecciones entre el pensamiento de Ricoeur y de Hegel en torno a temas vinculados con la voluntad, la razón práctica y el reconocimiento. Se mostrará que, tras una etapa inicial de reticencia a ocuparse con la filosofía de Hegel, esta se convierte para Ricoeur a mediados de los años 60 en una referencia ineludible en su confrontación con Freud, hasta el punto de llegar a experimentarla como una tentación, de la que parece querer desprenderse, (...) sobre todo en su reflexión sobre lo trágico y la historia en los años 80, pero que reaparece con fuerza en la última década del siglo pasado, hasta culminar con la teoría del reconocimiento, para la cual Hegel constituye una fuente principal, aunque no exclusiva. This article is about some intersecting points between Ricoeur's and Hegel's thought around issues related to free will, practical reason and recognition. After an initial stage of reluctance to deal with the philosophy of Hegel, it becomes for Ricoeur, in the mid-60s, an essential reference in his confrontation with Freud, feeling his influence as a temptation, which he wants to avoid, especially in his reflection about tragedy and history in the 80s. But this influence appears again notoriously, in the last decade of the 20thcentury, culminating with the theory of recognition, to which Hegel constitutes a major source, but not an exclusive one. (shrink)

Collective memory is thought to be something “more” than a conglomeration of personal memories which compose it. Yet, each of us, each individual in every society, remembers from a personal point of view. And if there is memory beyond personal experience through which collective identities are configured, in what “place” might one legitimately situate it? In addressing this question, this article examines the political significance of the distinction between two levels of what are often lumped together under the term of (...) “collective memory”: memories that are retained through the direct experience of groups or associations of a limited size and those that are rarely the object of direct experience constituting the events marking the identities of mass societies. (shrink)

Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of “the powers of the false,” Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities. She argues that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing are novels in which a space for unvoiced, silent, or silenced difference is created. Seen through (...) the lens of Deleuze and his collaborators’ philosophy, literature is a means for mediating knowledge and affects about historical events. Going beyond any simple dichotomy between true and untrue accounts of what “really” happened in the past, literature’s powers of the false incite readers to long for a narrative space in which painful or shameful stories can be included. (shrink)

In response to distant suffering, global civil society is being consumed by a generalized witnessing fever that converts public spaces into veritable machines for the production of testimonial discourses and evidence. However, bearing witness itself has tended to be treated as an exercise in truth-telling, a juridical outcome, a psychic phenomenon or a moral prescription. By contrast, this article conceives of bearing witness as a transnational mode of ethico-political labour, an arduous working-through produced out of the struggles of groups and (...) persons who engage in testimonial tasks in order to confront corresponding perils produced by instances of situational or structural violence; it is the work of witnessing, the normative and political substance generated through the performance of patterns of social action, which matters. Using Celan's allegory of the poem as a message in a bottle, I consider bearing witness as a web of cosmopolitan testimonial practices structured around five dialectically related tasks and perils: giving voice to mass suffering against silence ; interpretation against incomprehension ; the cultivation of empathy against indifference ; remembrance against forgetting ; and prevention against repetition. (shrink)

In this article I examine the challenging question concerning whether communal forgiveness is possible. In order to show that it is in principle possible I articulate and then respond to two of the most powerful objections to communal forgiveness that have been formulated to date, namely: the argument that only victims can forgive; and the argument that forgiveness is unconditional and thus outside the scope of such things as communal or political deliberation. I argue that communal forgiveness is a process (...) of transformation that requires at the practical level an institutional framework in which a representative of a community can initiate the process of forgiveness, like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu did in South Africa. Because forgiveness is a process of transformation, it cannot be assessed at the level of acts or commitments alone, but is a wager on the future that will indeed show whether the communities involved have accepted the transformation. (shrink)

The epistemological problem of the truth of memory cannot be resolved without establishing a clear distinction between recollection and phantasy. Husserl’s position in this regard is both paradoxical and compelling. It is paradoxical because Husserl repeats his antiskeptical intention many times; but nevertheless in his phenomenology, recollection and phantasy are almost completely identical. Perhaps no philosopher has so radically approached the experience of remembering and the experience of fantasizing as Husserl. But at the same time, the recognition of this fundamental (...) similarity is precisely what allows the phenomenologist to avoid empiricist misunderstandings and thus approach the problem of the distinction between recollection and phantasy in a much more persuasive way than the traditional one. In this paper, I will first try to show how and why Husserl approaches recollection and phantasy. Then I will try to show how it is possible to establish a clear distinction between these two phenomena without misunderstanding the possibility of false memory. (shrink)

A practice, a technique, an expertise cannot be left unexplored by an account that can explain their basis and organization as well as their objectives. Whether the internet is understood as a practice, or seen as a journey through a space that knows no borders, or cursed as humanity overreaching itself yet again (hybris), nevertheless its reality raises questions about our experience of the world (experimentum mundi) and explores its nature, giving an exact measure, beyond assumptions, of the relationship between (...) humans and machines. With this in mind a multicultural, multidisciplinary study was set up in the USA through the publication of Academy and the Internet, jointly edited by Helen Nissenbaum and Monroe Price (2004). The book sets out to examine the relations between the internet and economic issues, the internet and social problems of equality, politics (the question of public space), the communicative relationship in a virtual world. Interculturally speaking, only the Chinese contribution gives the debate - which is almost tribal since it is American to the core - an off-centre tone. A debate makes statements and analyses, but it also omits and may skate over other perspectives. Africa, which is absent from this debate, almost forces its way in via this paper. What is the position with the relationship between the internet and present-day African experience? Hardly coping as it is with the consequences of the recent introduction of writing, how is Africa experiencing this internet adventure, in which the status of images, words and time seems to be called into question? This brief presentation will look first at the status of technoscience - under which heading the internet is subsumed in Africa - and then at the challenges the internet throws up in the region. Our method will be to examine internet capacities from the viewpoint of oral cultures that are dominated economically. (shrink)

Corporate citizenship, social responsibility and sustainability reports could be analyzed from a philosophical viewpoint. In this article, we will use Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy to assess the narrativity of such reports. Out of a philosophical viewpoint, our exploratory study analyzes the contents of ten reports: two corporate citizenship reports, three corporate social responsibility reports, and five sustainability reports. Those reports are arising in-time and are thus referring to past corporate events and phenomena. Sometimes such reports introduce a corporate world-dream that (...) could emphasize various issues such as human dignity and inclusiveness/diversity, global health, and planetary stewardship. They could even convey a subversive ideal that could strongly shake the foundations of business. The way business corporations are understanding corporate citizenship and sustainability could, more or less radically, change the way we are doing business. However, those corporate citizenship, social responsibility and sustainability reports do not have any emplotment. They are thus stories that cannot be considered as narratives. We could call them “would-be” narratives. (shrink)

The word «history» can always be understood in two different meanings: as what happened in the past and as a story about the past. One and the same past can be described in different ways. The gap between historical events and representations of these events determines the diversity of historical discourses. Shifting the focus of the philosophy of history from identifying the con- ditions for the possibility of historical knowledge to the analysis of the process of historiography reflects an understanding (...) of the fundamental nature of historical discourses for the formation of pictures of the past. But the fascination with the subject of historical representation often overshadows what makes it possible in principle. Historical discourse is a modern narrative of the past. Thus, the condition for the possibility of historical discursiveness is the mediation of the horizons of the present and the past, which is a fundamental feature of the historicity of human existence. This article explains the discourses of memory and oppositional critical scientific history. Discourses of memory are considered as modern forms of manifestation of the historicity of human existence, because it is in them that the constant mediation of time horizons of the past and present becomes thematic. Critical history declaratively opposes the discourses of memory, but reveals the dependence of its methodological foundations on predetermined forms of under- standing the past presented in memory. The opposition between the discourses of memory and critical history structurally repeats the opposition of tradition and scientific history revealed in hermeneutics. The conceptual shift from tradition to memory reflects the fundamental changes in the modern understanding of historicity associated with the further detraditionalization and globalization of the world. Me- mory appears as a new form of understanding the past, associated with the fear of losing it, as well as understanding the distances and gaps in relation to it. Based on the differentiation of collective memory types, the corresponding types of dis- courses are distinguished. It is argued that historical discourses of identity cannot be identified with historical discourses of power, and historical-didactic and historical-aesthetic discourses are independent forms of modern attitude to the past. In an effort to separate critical reconstruc- tion from memory, scientific discourses become counterfactual to the taken for granted past, represented in the narratives of collective memory. (shrink)

This paper aims to address the manner in which the protester’s opposition, or what I consider as the protester’s being-there-against, “profiles” itself in the no-man’s-land between non-violence and violence. My focus is therefore to unfold some of its constitutive layers, relying on the conceptual tools prominently provided by Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology. The first constitutive layer concerns the protester’s bodily presence, seized first of all as a specific “here” and “there,” and then as an expressive body that is communicating through gestures. (...) Within the interpretation of one of these gestures—the fist raised in the air—I highlight the anamnestic nature of the protester’s being-there-against as it appears in the relationship with a state whose legitimacy comes from taking over the monopoly on violence. The second constitutive layer is related to the linguistic dimension of the protester’s presence: here special attention is paid to the way language and violence connect, having as background an analysis devoted to the surplus and the deficit of meaning attached to the slogans chanted by the protesters. (shrink)

The paper is focused on Genesis 1 – 3 where the primordial man [adàm] is created ‎and he was given the proper name Adam [adàm]. ‎ In Hebrew man and Adam are the same word, spelled the same way – [adàm]. ‎Different translations of Genesis 1-3 use for the first time the proper name Adam in ‎different places versions Gen 2:25; The German Luther ‎Bible Gen 3:8; Some English Protestant versions Gen 3:17; Bulgarian Protestant and many ‎English Protestant versions Gen (...) 3:20-21). The paper decodes the phenomenon by ‎studying the Hebrew original and several semiotic views on common and proper names ‎‎. Through these opinions the ‎important question “Who wrote the Bible?” is discussed. The analysis interfaces the new ‎linguistic relativity theory.‎ Four layers of symbolism are decoded: 1. The man became Adam; 2. The two men in ‎Gen 1:27 and in Gen 2:7 man [adàm] ‎is made by earth, ground [adamà]; 3. The two men in the New Testament ; 4. Edom, Adam and cultural discourses in both Testaments.‎. (shrink)

This article presents Paul Ricoeur's ideas about translation in view of giving some guidelines for the interpretation of cultures. Ricoeur's `hermeneutics of the self', which stresses the creativity of capable human being, has its source in a conviction of the superabundance of sense over the abundance of nonsense. It is the problem of the transmission of meaning from one language to another, from one culture to another that gives impetus to his preoccupation with translation. Ricoeur's radical astonishment before the plurality (...) of languages and cultures and his deep conviction about `communication' among human beings made him realize the urgent `task of translation' that is accompanied by a `task of morning'. If translation is the paradigm of all exchanges, its practice can provide us some guidelines in the dialogue of cultures. First, one must courageously open oneself to the `test' of the Other, to welcome difference and respect it as unsurpassable. Second, one must wager on the possibility of an `equivalence without identity', to take a non-hierarchical view of cultures. Third, one must undertake the `task of mourning', to learn to narrate otherwise, to interpret otherwise. (shrink)

Although Ricoeur and Taylor are often grouped together, their conceptions of language, literature, and practical reason are very different. The first half of this essay focuses on Ricoeur's theory of triple mimesis and narrative, showing how his attempt to synthesize Kant, Husserl, and structuralism results in a formalism that blocks out the ontological, hermeneutical, and historical dimensions of literature and practical reason. The second half of the essay develops Taylor's ontological conception of public imagination and illustrates the dynamics of this (...) conception of language and interpretation by showing how literary works debate with each other over language, subjectivity, and reference. Narrative does not just order; it argues. (shrink)

This paper is dedicated to the issue of collective guilt and the interconnection between theoretical political thinking and ethically grounded political action, collective guilt, and personal responsibility. It assumes that facing political events in a form of media representation (such as with the war conflict in Ukraine), we mostly deal with simulacra, which affects and creates passive shock content consumption instead of active participation. The interconnection between irrational and rational ways of interpretation of political conflict is shown together with the (...) attempt to rethink the social responsibility of nowadays, switching the prospective from synchronic to diachronic dimensions. Instead of producing descriptions that multiply monstrous zombie/victims-blaming apocalyptic discourse or subconsciously continuing to symbolically support “fratricide”, it is proposed to think about the legacy for future generations and see the moral dimension of politics in terms of “adults’ responsibility for children” as each one’s personal responsibility issue. Acting “as if you would wish all children on Earth to grow in safety and deserve a happy life no matter where (s)he would be born, as if it were a universal law” – this is proposed as an ethical-political common-sense formula, based on potential equality and global interconnection, maturity, and care – which could lead to a common goal of overcoming starvation, wars, sufferings, and catastrophes. (shrink)

Le travail et la formation des adultes sont aujourd’hui traversés de syntagmes mobilisés par une idéologie managériale dévoyant les termes d’autonomie, de responsabilité ou de capacité. À partir d’une analyse critique, l’article se propose de resituer ces glissements sémantiques dans le champ des recherches et des pratiques actuelles de la formation. Le recours aux travaux de Ricoeur et d’Honneth permet ensuite d’aborder leurs contributions respectives pour prolonger ces questions et leurs apports, en particulier, pour penser la reconnaissance. L’article se termine (...) par l’ouverture que permettent ces travaux pour les fondements de la formation, vers l’horizon d’une « vie bonne ». (shrink)

The article critiques Ricoeur’s theorizing of amnesty amnesia and political forms of memory through consideration of the Cold War commemoration and forgetting of the Nazi massacres at Tulle and Oradour.

This article explores the cultural form of the obituary as a contribution to ‘collective memory’. In order to assess the value of viewing the obituary through this lens, it is necessary to look at how memory and collective memory have been conceptualized in various authors, especially in the classic works of Bergson, Halbwachs and Benjamin. Tension emerges between those who think that such social forms of memorizing, like tradition, are declining across the board and those who think that they are (...) still alive but contained in new media such as the newspaper. For the latter, including the present author, these mosaics of tiny testimonies can shape collective memory. The cultural form of the obituary is undergoing an internal transformation. Although there is still considerable evidence of the material and social privilege of these subjects, the contemporary obituary is not restricted to the memory of the ‘dominants’. Obituary editors in national newspapers aspire to include all those who have significantly shaped the modern world, including figures hallowed in popular memory and even counter-memory. Moreover, obituaries have now branched out, beyond the arena of heroes and villains, into depictions of a more nuanced or contradictory world of tragedy and paradox. A key element of such memory is the public realm of producers. However here ‘heroes of production’ (workers or industrialists) figure much less frequently than those who have left distinguished cultural and scientific works for the collective inheritance. The article finally asks how the democratization of the form might be further advanced while also recognizing its inescapable foundation in the scarcity of distinction. (shrink)

Cultural heritage can offer tangible and intangible traces of the past. A past that shapes cultural identity, but also a past from which one sometimes wishes to detach oneself and which nevertheless needs to be remembered, even commemorated. These themes of memory, history and oblivion are examined by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur in his work La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Inspired by these ideas, this paper analyses how they are closely linked to cultural heritage. Heritage serves as a support for memory, (...) even if it can be mishandled, which in turn can affect heritage policies. Memory and heritage can be abused as a result of wounds from the past or for reasons of ideological manipulation or because of a political will to force people to remember. Furthermore, heritage, as a vehicule of memory, contributes to historical knowledge, but can remain marked by a certain form of subjectivism during the heritage and conservation operation, for which heritage professionals are responsible. Yet, the responsibility for conserving cultural heritage also implies the need to avoid any loss of heritage, and to fight against oblivion. Nonetheless, this struggle cannot become totalitarian, nor can it deprive the community of a sometimes salutary oblivion to its own identity construction. These theoretical and philosophical concepts shall be examined in the light of legal discourse, and in particular in Belgian legislation regarding cultural heritage. It is clear that the shift from monument to heritage broadens the legal scope and consequently raises the question of who gets to decide what is considered heritage according to the law, and whether there is something such as a collective human right to cultural heritage. Nonetheless, this broadening of the legislation extends the State intervention into cultural heritage, which in turn entails certain risks, as will be analysed with Belgium’s colonial heritage. (shrink)

Three female physicians were interviewed as part of a comprehensive investigation into the narratives of female and male physicians and nurses, concerning their experience of being in ethically difficult care situations in the care of elderly people. The interviewees expressed great concern for the low status of care for elderly people, and the need to fight for the specialty and for the care and rights of their patients. All the interviewees’ narratives concerned problems relating to perspectives of both action ethics (...) and relational ethics. The main focus was on problems concerning the latter perspective, expressed as profound concern and respect for the individual patient. Secondary emphasis was placed on relationships with relatives and other professionals. The most common themes in an action ethics perspective were too little treatment and the lack of health services for older patients, together with overtreatment and death with dignity. These results were discussed in the light of Løgstrup’s ethics, which emphasize that human life means expressing oneself, in the expectation of being met by others. Both Ricoeur’s concept of an ethics of memory and Aristotle’s virtue ethics are presented in the discussion of too little and too much treatment. (shrink)

In this article, I will explore the archeology of the concept of attestation in Ricoeur’s work. In a brief discussion of his early reflections on Husserl’s concept of the ego (as an example of reflexive philosophy), I show how the dialectic of trust and suspicion enters Ricoeur’s hermeneutic concerns. I argue that this dialectics remains present in his account of attestation. By a brief confrontation with Heidegger’s notion of attestation as developed in Being and Time, I show that the uniqueness (...) of Ricoeur’s account of attestation is to be found in this dialectic of trust and suspicion that he reinterprets in his later work in light of the concept of attestation. (shrink)

The study of corpography (corpographèse) in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians establishes a symptomatology of the body -linked to the experiences of torture and eroticism- that associates the illness with somnolence in the fictional text and the parasitization of the represented historical text. The tortured and undesired bodies of the protagonists undergo a process of objectification that manifests the acceleration of the fall of the Empire and the fragmentation of its discursive body as well as reinforces the secrecy and (...) illegibility of the text inscribed in the body of barbarism. This indecipherable text/body is defined by the paradox of the border labyrinth whose specularity gives rise to the illusion of control at the frontier between empire and barbarism. We will study, first of all, the writing of torture on the bodies, focusing on two organs - the eyes and the feet. Then, we will be interested in the erotic experience between the two protagonists. Finally, we will see how these vacuous bodies establish, at the border, a suspensive temporary bond with the historical and the memorial text. (shrink)

The author presents Ricoeur as a philosopher who advocates a sharp distinction between philosophy and theology. Yet, Ricoeur’s oeuvre testifies of a deep interest into Biblical hermeneutics. The author argues how the distinction between philosophy and theology runs through the whole of Ricoeur’s work, together with his interest in Biblical hermeneutics. What Ricoeur has said on Biblical hermeneutics can only be understood from a broad view of his philosophical themes. The actual approach of Ricoeur in matters of Bible and theology (...) is presented under the headings of listening, speaking, acting, falling silent, and believing. These are the verbs that express a hermeneutical attitude towards the Bible as a formative text for thinking, acting and believing. (shrink)