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diacritics / summer 2000 43
TRACING RICOEUR
DUDLEY ANDREW
Franois Dosse. PAUL RICOEUR: LES SENS DUNE VIE. Paris: La
Dcouverte,1997. [PR]
The Time of the Tortoise
Gilles Deleuze chose not to see the end of the century that
Michel Foucault claimedwould be named after him, a century that
began just as philosophy registered theaftershocks caused by the
work of his closest progenitors, Nietzsche and Bergson.Amplifying
the waves they made with tempests of his own, Deleuze tried to
capsize theflat-bottom boat of academic philosophy by insisting
that it look beyond its own discoursefor both the life and the
vocabulary to account for life that should be its only
mission.Scanning French philosophy for what it might contribute to
art, fiction, and cinema, Iinvoke the stirring character of
Deleuze, but I do so to deflect attention to another figure,Paul
Ricoeur, whom Deleuze conveniently sets off by contrast.
Less than a decade since his death, Deleuze is in danger of
having ceded his claimto Ricoeur, the real long-distance runner,
who is now pressing his publications into thenew century, moving
relentlessly beyond his exhausted reviewers. Last year, a fanfareof
publicity greeted La mmoire, lhistoire, loubli, another magisterial
tome appearingtoo late to be included in Franois Dosses
intellectual biography or in my overviewhere, which lifts off from
that biography. Ricoeur, destined to keep writingunable toconclude
his conversation with philosophyhas outlasted Deleuze, whose
notorietyderives from the radical break he makes with the thought
of our times, for his abruptdeviations and more abrupt conclusions.
Ricoeurs reputation rests seldom on anythingconclusive but instead
on his persistent interaction with and deployment of so much ofthat
thought. By accident or by savvy design, Ricoeurs trajectory
(initiated in thephenomenological atmosphere of the prewar era) has
taken him through myth criticism,psychoanalysis, structuralism,
language philosophy, analytic philosophy, deconstruction,poetics,
historiography, ethics, and epistemology. He carries his learning
forward toeach new endeavor, not believing in the radical break or
the prefix post-.
Franois Dosse tracks Ricoeur in a magnificent account that
places its subject inrelation to each of these movements. But
Parisian academic fashion forms only onefacet of a life whose
brilliance is refracted as well by theology, politics, and a
remarkablesocial network. The thickness of his life evidently
provides Ricoeur the necessary ballastto maintain his orientation
on the stormy seas of intellectual debate. In fact, across aspan of
seventy years of uninterrupted reading and writing, he has
anticipated, invoked,or debated virtually every important school of
French thought, doing so in a way thatboth establishes their value
and serves his own agenda. Ricoeur profits from theproductive
tension that results, evenindeed, especiallywhen this brings about
adislocation of his views. These exchanges inevitably leave his own
ideas clearer, moredefensible, and invulnerable to charges of
parochialism. Although Ricoeur concludeshis three-volume Time and
Narrative with an aggressive chapter explicitly asking,
diacritics 30.2: 4369
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44
Should We Renounce Hegel?, there is something deeply Hegelian
about this strategyof taking on, then managing to assimilate, all
comers so as to emerge stronger. Ricoeurmay not share Hegels
limitless arrogance (literally arrogating everything to
himself),but his humility is equally ambitious.
There was never any question for Deleuze about renouncing Hegel.
His antipathyto this philosophe de ltat was immediate, total, and
itself completely arrogant. Asfor Ricoeur, Deleuze apparently
avoided the man Dosse dubs philosophe de la Cit,at least before
1986. Then, he links their names after each had just published
amultivolume treatise on temporality and fabulation, Deleuzes
cinema books picking upthe notion of bifurcated time that Ricoeur
had just developed in Time and Narrative.Proust was explicitly a
key source for both of their studies. But apparently, and
outwardly,it gets no closer than this. In concatenating these two
French philosophers, I follow thelead of Olivier Mongin, who finds
them both to be supreme philosophers of time, yetincompatible on
the basic question of mediation with regard to time [Mongin
128].Where Deleuzes books on the cinema proclaim the immediacy of
time, Ricoeur insiststhat time is unthinkable except as mediated,
whether through fictional or historicalnarrative. Mongin opposes
Ricoeur and Deleuze by distinguishing the objects theyrespectively
champion (the rcit and the cinema), but I propose to drag Ricoeur
to thecinema, where he could have the effect of cultivating ideas
about the film image (indeedthe idea of cinema) that Deleuze sowed
in the first place. In doing so, I force a chemicalreaction that
never catalyzed on its own, despite the proximity of these men, who
certainlymust have met at the famous week with Heidegger in 1955 at
Crisy-la-Salle [Dosse,PR 418] and when they taught philosophy in
Paris thereafter.
The cinema, it turns out, opens a historical context that
justifies, if only in ahypothetical way, the yoking of such
divergent philosophical styles. As a buddingphilosopher and
cinphile in the late 40s and into the 50s, involved in a complex
waywith the then-reigning phenomenological paradigm, Deleuze must
have paid specialattention to Andr Bazins great essays in Esprit, a
journal whose rapport withphenomenology was explicit, and whose
guiding philosophical intelligence was PaulRicoeur. Ricoeur was
only intermittently in Paris during the decade after the
war;nevertheless, his close relation to Esprit would have brought
him into contact with Bazin,who like him was a disciple of its
charismatic editor Emmanuel Mounier. Moreover,Ricoeur had been led
by Gabriel Marcel to think philosophy through art,
particularlydrama. With Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Amede Ayfre
writing about cinema in theseyears, we should expect Ricoeur to
have been intrigued by this art, which was, underBazins aegis,
inflating its ambitions to the limit. And so I am permitted to
imagine alost chapter in Dosses biography. It details the chance
encounters among Ricoeur,Deleuze, and Bazin at the Cinmathque
Franaise or at Truffauts Cin-club de lasalle noire. The bifurcated
temporality that both Ricoeur and Deleuze develop in the1980s Bazin
effectively wrote about in his 1950 Orson Welles, the first auteur
study Iknow of. As much as the pith of Proust, the complexly
perspectival world of Wellesand of the modernist idea of cinema
that flourished in postwar Pariscould have setboth Ricoeur and
Deleuze on their paths, which would cross decades later on the
questionof temporality.
Compared to Deleuze, Ricoeur has pursued his path in a patient
and long-suffering manner, two of his many virtues. These
complement the beatitude that Themeek shall inherit the earth,
which can just as easily be read as a slogan for a crusade.Meekly,
Ricoeurs thought has infiltrated numerous domains in the humanities
and socialsciences, producing a high-minded, sententious kind of
resistance. To calculate the impactof his workaday ethic, it is
enough to note that Ricoeur directed the thesis or served asmentor
to Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancire, Vincent
Descombes,
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diacritics / summer 2000 45
Jean-Franois Lyotard, and Michel de Certeau [PR 25455]. He has
left his mark, andmore.
While the Protestant faith he has steadfastly professed may not
have directed ororganized his strictly philosophical undertakings
(a philosophical Christian rather thana Christian philosopher, he
circumspectly calls himself), it has decidedly affected
hisreception in France and abroad. He was ignored for years, then
vilified in FrancebutChristian intellectuals throughout Europe
welcomed him. At his direst moment, afterthe disaster he suffered
at Nanterre in 1970, he accepted a three-year post at the
CatholicUniversity of Louvain in Belgium. The crucial rapport that
he has maintained with theUniversity of Chicago dates from the same
period (teaching in the Divinity Schoolrather than in the
department of philosophy, from which he always felt alienated
evenwhen offering for them popular seminars in Continental
thought). In Paris, by contrast,Ricoeur endured the contempt of
prestigious peers for keeping religion within the orbitof his
concerns. Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan
refused to takehim seriously or to engage in the dialogue he always
invites. Their immense influenceturned students away from reading
him. He was taken to be a throwback to another ageof philosophy,
addressing an audience of graying parishioners. When he was forced
toresign as dean of Nanterre University in 1970, it was as if this
view had been officiallyconfirmed. At the same moment, Foucault
emerged as a hero of the radical youth andwas elevated to a chair
at the Collge de France, which he took in direct competitionwith
Ricoeur [PR 51718].
But the pendulum has swung the other way. English readers have
been able toregister Ricoeurs reemergence in the past two decades
through the instantaneoustranslation of his books, the appearance
of an 830-page compilation of his interchangeswith other thinkers,
edited by Louis Hahn for the Library of Living Philosophers
series,and Charles E. Reagans amiable Paul Ricoeur: His Life and
His Work. In France Ricoeurhas been ever more prominent in the
media and in public exchanges with high-profilepeers from the hard
and social sciences. Increasingly, scholars in domains such as
historyand cinema studies have cited him. And then in 1997 came
Dosses nearly 800-pagePaul Ricoeur: Les sens dune vie. Dosse took
on this project following his indispensabletwo-volume History of
Structuralism. Evidently in preparing that study he
encounteredRicoeur again and again as someone at odds with, or to
the side of, the dominant trendsin postwar French intellectual life
[Dosse interview]. Determining to readdress the periodthrough
Ricoeur turns out to have been not only a fair but an astute
decision, for Ricoeurgives Dosse entre to traditions of thought
that precede structuralism and persist after it,trends that Ricoeur
has been at pains to put in dialogue with structuralism and its
avatars.
Although Dosse may originally have taken up Ricoeur as a
convenience to roundout his picture of the past half-century, the
man soon emerges in Dosses book as perhapsits most responsive and
responsible thinker. Given enough time and sufficient
occasions,Ricoeurs modesty and doggedness have been rewarded even
in a country that prizesostentation and flair. This would be the
hagiographic explanation: Ricoeur, philosopherof will, has
triumphed by sheer good will, not by the will to power. Dosse
charts therise to power of Ricoeurs goodness, finding in his
achievement of continuity an antidoteto the discontinuity of our
age. But if Ricoeur has managed to engage intellectual
fadsseriously, letting his own ideas be inflected by the signs of
the times, a more structuralrather than biographical analysis would
examine precisely those signs and those times,finding it logical
that the general malaise of French thought after poststructuralism
andparticularly in a postcommunist period should provoke a return
to ethics (as in EmmanuelLevinas). From this perspective, what
Dosse calls Ricoeurs consecration is merelyanother moment in the
self-propelled movement of fashion, and this biography forms
acontinuation, not the obverse, of his volumes on
structuralism.
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46
Empathy and Biography
The shape and style of this biography emulate the ethos of its
central character. Dossedubs Ricoeur un matre penser, someone who
unobtrusively elicits and extendsthinking; this, to distinguish him
from the lionized matres penseurs of the last half-century, the
fashion-model masterthinkers named Lacan, Althusser, Derrida,
Barthes,Bourdieu, et al. [PR 600; Dosse interview]. The abundance
of the books research andthe range of topics addressed in its
seventy chapters try to match Ricoeurs own drive tobe comprehensive
in each of his studies and in their accumulated thrust. Where
mostbiographies of intellectuals aim to account for the development
of ideas in the events ofa life, Ricoeurs rather eventless life
tempts Dosse to reverse the direction, explainingthe person as in
fact a product of the ideas. As in one of Ricoeurs hermeneutic
studies,Dosse feels obliged to take seriously each position Ricoeur
has encountered, from theempiricism of his first philosophy teacher
in high school to a more sophisticated formof the same philosophy
in the work of the neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux, withwhom he
recently debated [Changeux and Ricoeur].
Although he associates mainly with the greats in philosophy,
theology, and literature,Ricoeur dismisses personality and
character, dissolving biography into a vast culturalfield of
reading and discussion. Personality amounts to a style of reading
andinterpretation, a tailored trajectory of detours and
displacements made in passing fromone knotty issue to another,
always in search of solid ground. But personal identity,
likeontology, is an unfinished project, a constantly receding
horizon that orients but doesnot constitute a life. Dosse accepts
Ricoeurs beliefas much an intellectual position asa private
desirethat the subject is best known indirectly. Deciding not to
access Ricoeurhimself, he pursued his work from the outside,
interviewing scores of those who haveknown him, reading Ricoeur the
reader. And he has done so with the same forthrightnessand
generosity that characterize Ricoeurs reading and writing. No
dramatic or secretmoments bring instant illumination to this life.
Nothing is hidden, except, of course, thetruth itself, which the
life is ever in search of. Ricoeurs strongest ideas involve
narrativeidentity, a fact that prompts Dosse to discover his
subject only through encounters withothers, in a drama of
decentering and contextualization, as Ricoeur expands andtransforms
his thought, his concerns, and, if we can use the contested term,
himself.
Dosse adopts Ricoeurs favored posture: by maintaining a
forthright yet deflectedapproach, he arrives at a second, or
deliberated, naivet. Other biographers might havedwelt
psychoanalytically on Ricoeur the orphan of World War I, striving
to grow intothe father whom that war took from him; or on the
usurpation of his life by an interminableprogram of academic labor.
(We are told that he has the constitution to write twelvehours a
day on a routine basis.) But Dosse, except in one instance,
triangulates thepersonality of his subject, pinpointing his
relation to one thinker after another. Theexceptional instance is
the suicide of one of Ricoeurs five children in 1987. This
chapter,titled La traverse du mal absolu, shows Ricoeur grappling
directly with somethinghe cannot assimilate to a higher good or to
the order of understanding. This worst ofprivate tragedies changed
his writing and his demeanor; yet, in Dosses account, it madehim
all the more himself, becoming the somber impetus behind his master
work,published in 1990, Soi-mme comme un autre (Oneself as
Another).
What makes Ricoeurs trajectory of reading and interpretation so
worth tracking?Philosophe de la Cit, he exists as a public
intelligence with the public good ever inmind. Rarely calling upon
arcane sources, Ricoeur returns to the traditionfrom Platoand
Aristotle to Heidegger and Austinto reorient mainstream philosophy
by protectingit from extremes. And he has consistently made use of
philosophy to disentangle publiccontroversies and to plead for
responsible action. Dosses long book lays out one
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diacritics / summer 2000 47
intellectual, political, religious, or pedagogical situation
after another, locating Ricoeursneed to respond, and then detailing
that response through excellent summaries of histexts. Along the
way we are treated to succinct reviews of the work of major
writers(Gabriel Marcel, Karl Barth, Edmund Husserl, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Claude Lvi-Strauss)and of some forgotten ones as well
(the political philosopher Andr Philip, for instance,or Ricoeurs
rival in the fifties, Tran Duc Thao, the brilliant Husserl scholar
who leftParis to help build a government in Hanoi only to return,
after the Vietnam War, out offavor, destitute, and without a
country). Occasionally Dosse indulges our taste for gossipof the
high and the mighty, as when he details several egregious instances
of Lacansunpardonably haughty behavior toward the ingenuous
Ricoeur. On the whole, however,Ricoeurs devotion to the interplay
and also to the fair play of ideas diminishes personaland
professional drama. Dosse is convinced (and he convinces us) that
Ricoeurs approachto the life of the mind, to life itself, is
vigorously healthy. Regardless of the positions hehas upheld over
the years (most of which, in Dosses survey, seem apropos,
consistent,and liberating, though seldom brilliant), his selflessly
virtuous attitude, at once passionateand reflective, has had a
salubrious effect in a world where top intellectuals seem moreoften
to behave like politicians and celebrities.
As a public intellectual, Ricoeur is best defined by the
situations into which heinserted himself. Dosse parses his life
into ten sections: the 1930s; the experience of theprisoner-of-war
camp; the period of reflection in the mountain village of
Chambon,194648; the University of Strasbourg, 194856; the
nonconformist in the heart of theSorbonne, 195764; facing up to the
masters of suspicion (Althusser, Lacan, Lvi-Strauss,Greimas),
196070; the adventure of the University at Nanterre, 196570;
eclipse inFrance and the detour through America, 197085;
recognition and triumph; a philosopherin the Cit. Each section
contains chapters that highlight, in turn, the spheres of
Ricoeursconcerns: political and pedagogical conflicts,
philosophical problems and challenges,religious and theological
issues, the extended family circle within which he has workedand
lived; international contacts. His has been a life of words, those
of ancient thinkershe has drawn on, of current thinkers he has
promoted, of courses he has taught, ofcontroversial journal
articles he has penned or reacted to, of memorable lectures he
hasgiven and others he has attended. Over 1500 names show up in the
index, a roster ofthose whose ideas have mattered over the last
century, and not just in France.
Indeed, not just in France. Dosse makes us believe that of the
many Frenchintellectuals who have struck up relations with one
American university or another,Ricoeur has profited most from the
interchange. His years at Chicago have altered theway he gives
seminars in Paris, turning them into dynamic sessions of
give-and-take,rather than the edifying lectures that are the norm
in the French system. Nor would hisrecent books exist without the
influence of Anglo-American philosophy (Austin,Strawson, Davidson,
Parfitt, and so on). More recently, he has left the door open for
adialogue with Asian philosophers and religious thinkers, wanting
ever to multiply pointsof view on questions of Being. Ricoeur does
not expect the truth from any interlocutor,each necessarily finite,
but he does expect to understand better whatever questions bothhe
and that interlocutor (whether ancient Greek or contemporary
Japanese) have cometo address.
Ricoeurs hermeneutics constitutes a faith in the human quest for
Being, as muchas a method for understanding questions posed of
Being. In this Ricoeur edges close toBazins Ontology, wherein
cinematography allows us to access reality, but only fromshifting
and always finite perspectives. The art of making and watching
films, like thepractice of interpretation, is a discipline of
establishing and multiplying perspectives onreality. Languages,
styles, and ideologies mix and clash, yet according to these
men,they do so over issues that stretch before and beyond all
views.
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48
Ricoeur puts divergent views to work, setting them one against
the other, chartinga route from one problematic to the next, as he
keeps the dialogue of philosophy movingforward. And so one finds in
Dosses biographyand then supremely throughoutRicoeurs
oeuvreexceptionally clear recapitulations of key issues in Husserl,
Freud,Althusser, Greimas, Derrida, and many others. But Ricoeur is
no encyclopedist. Heneeds to cut cleanly to the center of the
positions involved because his own positionencompasses the dialogue
between, say, phenomenology and structuralism or betweensemiotics
and the theory of reference. His hermeneutics defines itself as a
method tobreak through the limits of positions and vocabularies.
Something more, somethingpotentially liberating, becomes available
to the understanding when vocabularies brushup against one another.
Sometimes, as in metaphor, one field is helpfully redescribed bya
foreign vocabulary (for example, mythology newly understood in the
language ofstructural linguistics); sometimes two vocabularies open
onto a domain that neithercould access alone (historiography and
narratology allowing a conception of narrativeidentity). Ricoeur
has had to counter insinuations of eclecticism. He would call
hisdisplays of erudition strategic; they allow him either to
triangulate his own emergingviews or (to use his definition of
metaphor) to remap a philosophical problem entirely,allowing it to
come into view in an entirely new way.
Situations and Trajectories
Ricoeurs piety before great thinkers and his taste for abstract
ideas were undoubtedlyabetted by the sermons he was asked each
Sunday to meditate on. While he dutifullypursued high school and
undergraduate philosophy courses, his nascent social andreligious
imagination was ignited by the vibrant non-conformism of 1930s
France.Extracurricular philosophy for Ricoeur included Bergson on
one side and the faddishGerman philosophers on the other
(Nietzsche, to be sure, followed by Husserl, Heidegger,and the
return of Hegel via Alexandre Kojves much-discussed courses). Where
Deleuzewould resuscitate the Bergson and Nietzsche of the 1890s
with the two wonderful bookshe wrote in the 1960s, Ricoeur
encountered Bergson as virtually a contemporary, indeedas the
author of Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, a
best-seller when heread it in 1932. Ricoeur at nineteen was just
finishing his baccalaureate at Rennes,under a Neo-Thomist who
pushed him to read the canon systematically and with rigor,and for
whom Bergson, despite having moved toward Catholicism, was
forbidden fruit.In any case, Bergsons day had passed with the Great
War; his popularity was with thepublic, not with those who taught
and studied at the Sorbonne. Although Ricoeur didnot directly study
Bergson, many in his circle had felt his influence; and he could
onlybe impressed with a philosophy that dealt with pressing
problems in an engaged, decidedlynonscholastic style. Philosophy
could, in short, be alive. Ricoeur set off from Rennes insearch of
this life, first by moving to Paris, and then by looking outside
the academicenvironment dominated there by the lucubratory
neo-Kantian Lon Bruschwicg, withwhom he wrote a masters thesis.
In Paris, Ricoeur found the vivacity he was looking for in
Gabriel Marcel, whoserenowned Fridays he assiduously attended as an
antidote to his courses at the Sorbonne.Refreshingly unacademic,
Marcel insisted that his salons be free of the weight
ofphilosophical authority and that they deal with matters of
existence, not method. Yearafter year, political, social,
religious, and aesthetic issues were presented by theparticipants
who thought them through without the support or clarification of
canonicalformulations. Sartre and Levinas were among those who
attended from time to time,doubtless shaking things up with the
Husserl and Heidegger they had studied in Germany.
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diacritics / summer 2000 49
(Sartre would always disdain Marcel for his conversion to
Catholicism, and perhapsbecause he had preceded him as a successful
playwright.) Young activists came as well,full of the fiery
discourse erupting each month in such upstart journals as Ordre
nouveau,Prsences, and Raction. Marcel encouraged nonconformist
thought-in-action; and inthe freedom and moral seriousness of this
fellowship Ricoeur presented his first genuinelypersonal
disquisition, Justice, a topic on which he continues to write to
this day.
In the cauldron of the Popular Front era, the young Ricoeur
could speak of justiceas more than a philosophical issue.
Calvinist, he argued against Karl Barths Lutheranismthat
Christianity must transform, not turn its back on, the world.
Transformation shouldmove from reflection to action, he wrote in
Hic et nunc, one of the short-lived leftistjournals on whose edges
he hovered during the entire decade. A Protestant organ
publishedout of Andr Gides apartment, where Denis de Rougemont, one
of its directors, wasliving in 1936, Hic et nunc meant to serve as
a site for intellectual transformation, likethe more radical ETRE
and Terre nouvelle. The latter, a journal of
revolutionaryChristianity, sported a cross as well as a hammer and
sickle on its cover, and so wascondemned by the Vatican and Moscow
alike. In one of its issues Ricoeur proclaimedhimself a pacifist
who nonetheless must advocate intervention of the international
lefton behalf of Republican Spain. In these complex days he drew
closest to Esprit (foundedin 1932), establishing a relationship
with Emmanuel Mounier that would flourish afterthe war. Mounier
represented something like Marcel in action.
But it was not just the pressing politics of the day that pushed
Ricoeur beyond thosecozy Fridays at Marcels apartment. His
commitment to the act of reading led him todistrust the primacy of
personal reflection that Marcel persistently advocated. The
tworetained great affection for each other, however. Marcel was the
first person to greetRicoeur upon his return from captivity in
1945, and it is to Marcel that in 1950 Ricoeurdedicated the first
volume of his own philosophy, Freedom and Nature. In the late
60sthey published a wonderful book together, Tragic Wisdom and
Beyond. On the surfacea set of radio interviews of Marcel by
Ricoeur, in fact this book constitutes a sympatheticand productive
dialogue, dialogue being the cast of thought and speech they
mutuallyuphold as primary.
Dialogue clarifies differences and filiations. While Ricoeur
worries that Marcelcan be charged with murkiness and lack of
method, no one can question his courage toface philosophy
bare-handed. The twin topics Marcel introduced in the second part
ofhis path-breaking Journal mtaphysique, and then pursued in later
studies, The Mysteryof Being and Incarnated Thought, are scattered
throughout Ricoeurs books andbecome the focus of his essay on
Marcel written in 1984 [Lectures 2 5053]. Ricoeurhas tried to
answer to the depth of both mystery and body, but in a way that
sheds onthem the brightest possible light, something Marcel, a man
of music and literature asmuch as a philosopher, never cared to do.
Marcels existential phenomenology growsout of his experience with
art, which he felt could tell us more than pure
philosophicalanalysis about the topics that mattered to him, such
as identity. In Bergonism andMusic, he described the figure of the
theme as welling up from an anonymous pastin the music listener who
intuits it and recognizes its aptness. Marcel describes
thisquasi-past as not any particular section of a historical
becoming, more or less explicitlyassimilated to a movement in
space, such as a film sequence. It is rather the inner depthsof
oneself . . . sentimental perspectives according to which life can
be relived not as aseries of events but to the extent that it is an
indivisible unity which can only beapprehended as such through art
[Bergsonism and Music 149].
Ricoeurs later ideas, particularly on living metaphor and
narrative identity,can be seen in germ here in Marcels ideas: a
composer and his hearers encounter eachother in the figure of a
musical theme which satisfies an expectation that is discovered
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only in the hearing of it. This anonymous past, colored by
personal nuance characterizesnot only our response to music but our
relation to culture generally. We are born not tocreate meaning
from the isolated point of our existence (Sartre, Descartes); we
are bornalready belonging to meanings that we gradually discover,
recognize, modify, make ourown in returning to. Marcel shared with
Sartre the sense of the essential risk ofsubjectivity, its
insubstantiality, but Marcels faith waited in the expectation that
thisrisk would reap dividends of authenticity upon its maturation.
Never self-confident inits being, a self nevertheless can proceed
confidently on a road called genuineness,whose final destination
remains ever the road: Homo viator.
Dosse picks up an echo of homo viator in his subtitle, for Les
sens dune viecharacterizes its subject, Ricoeur, as engaging
meanings (sens) but only as someonewhose thought is en route. Like
Marcel, Ricoeur holds no doctrine but follows a direction(sens)
with a distinct trajectory and continuity. And yet one can
precisely plot everyzigzag, detour, and sudden breakthrough of his
journey, since these all take place on theimmense map of philosophy
with whose coordinates he, far more than Marcel, orientshimself.
When faced with a problem, Ricoeurs characteristic first movement
isbackwards, retreat. This term bears a prominent pedigree, Ricoeur
adopting it fromGabriel Marcel, who was ever suspicious of
progressivism, positivism, scientism,dialectical Hegelianism.
Marcel counseled retreat when faced with a mystery, aconundrum in
which one is intimately involved (unlike a mere problem to be
solved).In pulling back within the self, in a mood of recollection,
one can scan the inner landscape,including ones resources,
heritage, and situation, not to mention ones affections,
beforeleaping forward in a calculated risk of thought.
Marcels dramatic and highly personal manner of doing philosophy
is bolstered bya French tradition one can trace to Montaigne and
Pascal. His modern progenitor,however, is Maine de Biran,who at the
outset of the nineteenth century initiated a styleof personal
thought from the literal retreat that, as a nobleman, he was forced
to makeduring the French Revolution. Marcels Journal mtaphysique
takes its cue from Mainede Birans Journal intime, a sustained
reflection on the inner life, beginning at what hethought was the
beginning: the sensations of the body responding to an exterior
field ofobjects and other selves [see Gouhier]. After a generation
of the determinism of theFrench philosophes, Maines recovery of
free will within the material world (enactedthrough corporeal
powers of vision and movement) set the stage for Bergsons
subsequentelaboration of the topic at the end of the century in
Matter and Memory.
Bergsons great book, which Deleuze championed all his life,
which Marcel wasbeholden to (he dedicated his Journal mtaphysique
to Bergson), and which Ricoeurcontritely agrees is a masterpiece he
has yet adequately to address [Ricoeur, Azouvi,and Launay 18889],
couches the existential human drama in proto-scientific
terms.Bergson alternates between neuroscientist and reflective
philosopher, taking both parts,as it were, in the same sort of
dialogue Ricoeur and Changeux would exchange a centurylater [see
Changeux and Ricoeur]. He doesnt shrink from describing the human
brainas a relay between sensation and action, but crucially he adds
that this relay works witha built-in delay [Matter and Memory 30].
Consciousnessreflectiontakes place inand as this delay when, faced
with some situation in the present, layers within a volumeof memory
are traversed and sampled before the organism adjusts its stance
and reactsto face the future. Marcel was struck by this image of
consciousness as time spent in amemory vault. He conceived of this
vault, as did Bergson and Maine de Biran, in personalterms, the
self as unplumbed volume of depth. Ricoeur, who cites Marcel,
Husserl, andMaine de Biran as key influences on the same page of
his Intellectual Autobiography[Hahn 12], would likely characterize
this vault as some sort of library, full of volumes,whose ideas,
sentiments, and positions shuffle in constant interplay and to
which we
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diacritics / summer 2000 51
turn when conning experience. Libraries form second lines of
retreat when inner resourcesfail and we must think further and
otherwise. Unlike Marcel, Ricoeur accorded directinterior
reflection little credit. How quick he is to burrow into the
further recesses of thelibrary and from there into the meandering
ideas of individual volumes. As he puts it,hermeneutic
distanciation is a variant of Husserls phenomenological epoch
[Rflexionfaite 58], a way to achieve clarity and to depersonalize
immediate experience.
The value and practice of retreat, surely ingrained early on in
his religious educationand then in his formative discussions with
Marcel, became Ricoeurs de facto mode ofexistence during the 1940s.
So too did the German language and German philosophy,which he had
begun systematically to study after 1936. For Ricoeur was captured
in1940 and sequestered in a prison camp in Poland for the duration
of the war. Miraculously,he found himself incarcerated with other
intellectuals, including Mikel Dufrenne, theKantian phenomenologist
who would remain a lifelong friend. Dosse paints a vividpicture of
this odd refuge of philosophy, supported by a modest library of
donated booksthat included the complete works of Karl Jaspers and
the Ideen of Husserl. Ricoeurmade an interlinear translation of the
latter, while he and Dufrenne systematically wentthrough the
Jaspers, preparing a coauthored study that would come out in 1948.
Theyperfected their German and improvised lectures, Ricoeur
extemporizing on Nietzschewithout notes at one memorable session.
Once released, rather than throw himself likemost of his
contemporaries into the work of reconstructing Frances cultural
institutions,he took his family to the mountain village of Chambon,
which had been a literal refugefor Jewish children during the war.
Invited to teach in this idyllic community by AndrPhillip, the
charismatic social activist whom he had known in Protestant circles
in the30s, he effectively opted out of the postwar struggles for
cultural power. Ricoeur in themountains, like Christ in the desert,
tested himself and his ideas in complete isolation.Subsisting on
very little for three cold years, he used this haut lieu de
retraite to finishhis doctoral thesis, his Husserl translation, and
the Jaspers book (when Dufrenne cameto visit). He also tried out on
very young students the courses he would soon give at hisfirst
university post in Strasbourg.
Ricoeur brought to Strasbourg a certain brand of French postwar
existentialism,especially that of Marcel and Merleau-Ponty, which
he bolstered with the more rigorousphenomenology of Husserl. Beyond
Ideen and Husserls other published books, Ricoeurcould now study
thousands and thousands of pages of the masters notes just
uncoveredin a Belgian archive. Ricoeur staked his claim to become
their principal overseer, aposition he would inherit from
Merleau-Ponty. This was more than academic curatorialwork, for
Husserls particularism formed the mentalist obverse of Marcels
carnalapproach. While Ricoeur would ultimately recognize how
different were thephenomenologies they practiced, they equally
contributed to founding a conception ofthe person. Crucial here is
Husserls doggedness in filling the interstitial zone
betweenintention and sheer sensation. When supplemented by his
Phenomenology of InternalTime Consciousness, this zone in effect
becomes for Husserl the site of the person,including style and
continuity.
Ricoeur understood Husserls abstract formulations to underlie
the personal andpolitical ideas (he could not term it philosophy)
of Mounier, without the latters realizingit. In chapter five of his
summary book of 1946, Quest ce que le personnalisme?,Mounier calls
on Marcel, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, and Maine de Biran to help him
accountfor the double alienation afflicting modern human beings
(from the world and fromother people) [see Mounier]. Ricoeur grew
very close to Mounier just before the lattersdeath in 1950 while
Ricoeur was translating Husserls Ideen. Evidently Mounier hopedto
recruit a heavy-hitting philosopher, as he might a lawyer, to
validate his socialmovement in the eyes of the academic court. In a
most happy moment, Ricoeur
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contributed his abstract intellectual work (on Husserl and
Marcel) to the social reach ofPersonalism and its journal, Esprit,
for which he began to write regularly and where hefound, as Dosse
puts it, a collective intellectual identity of a community of hope
[PR57].
As with Marcel, Ricoeur believed he had to step beyond Husserl,
but never beyondHusserls desire to grasp life at its immediate
points of contact. Modest, Ricoeur doubtedthat he (or anyone) could
fulfill this desire unaided. In fact, contra Marcel and
contraHusserl, he readily declared the need for precedent
formulations, not so much to lean onas to think with into the
future. And so, although his philosophy is suspended betweenthe
quest (modernist and Husserlian) to build things up anew and a
belief (moretraditional) that mankind has ever confronted the
selfsame problem of rememberingexistencea problem Marcel encouraged
everyone to pose as though for the very firsttimeRicoeur has
formalized what appears a most standard philosophical practice,that
of reading and interpreting earlier philosophers. Hermeneutics
names the practicehe would eventually adopt to mediate problems
that have been deliberately posed byphenomenology as immediate.
Hermeneutic phenomenology, at first an oxymoron, comesto stand for
contact with existence that is culturally shared before being taken
as personal.Ricoeur enlarges the temporality at the heart of
phenomenology beyond the subject,until it stretches across
centuries on the wings of interpretation, while
remainingauthentically human. This aspiration he shares with
Gadamer, though he invariably turnstoward the future and toward
action, whereas Gadamers constant concern is with traditionand the
past.
The built-in cultural dimension of Ricoeurs philosophical
program fits perfectly apersonality that thrives on dialogue and
social concern. At Strasbourg from 1948 to1956 he enjoyed fertile
interaction with a close-knit group of colleagues and students,in
both philosophy and theology. He treasured good conversation about
serious topicsin the classroom, in the extremely active Esprit
study group, and in his religiouscongregation. Building on the
reservoir of reading notes and ideas accumulated duringhis
isolation in the 1940s, his courses grew in reputation and variety,
as did hispublications. Called to the Sorbonne in 1957, he would
leave forever the conventionalsatisfactions of provincial
university life for a far more consequential public arena.
In Paris, as Dosse recounts it, Ricoeur could not help but
become involved incontemporary social issues discussed in the
journals he kept up with. He arrived at theSorbonne after having
just lobbed into the public sphere three pieces on the response
ofthe West to China, which Dosse finds feeble but which indicate a
new sense ofresponsibility to the larger world of politics. Almost
immediately came the Hungarianuprising that split the left over
Stalin; hardly had this storm diminished than the brutaldebate over
Algeria escalated. Ricoeur took an immediate and forthright stand
againstcolonization; he found himself questioned by the police for
hiding soldiers desertingfrom that war. His name could be found on
petitions, in theological debates, and on thepages of a range of
journals. His bibliography shows a surprising number of
addressesconcerning topics as diverse as science, youth, internment
camps, communism, andZionism [Hahn 64653].
In all this Esprit felt like his home; for there, in the spirit
of a Personalism imbibedthrough Husserl, Marcel, and Mounier, he
could write without condescension on mattersat once philosophical
and directly political. So closely did he identify with its
principlesthat in the late 1950s he would be thought of as the next
director, Protestant though hewas. Esprit literally became his home
in 1957 when he moved into Les Murs Blancs inChtenay-Malebray just
to the south of Paris. Mounier had bought this lovely propertywith
its three buildings in 1939 and shared it with other Personalists.
Even after a 1957shake-up in editorial direction, Chtenay-Malebray
maintained itself as a unique
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intellectual and moral community. Dosse describes with envy an
ambience of generositysufficiently utopian to quiet the occasional
conflicts of position and personality thatinevitably arose among
the men, women, and dozen children who lived there in
closecompanionship.
Chtenay-Malebray effectively served as the editorial
headquarters for Esprit, wherefriends and adherents, often more
than fifty strong, regularly gathered to planand toexchange views
ontopics the journal had decided to feature. Ricoeurs views
invariablyput him on the left even by Esprits standards. In 1960 he
took it upon himself to organizean issue of the journal devoted to
sexual mores, in order to bring Esprit into contact
withcontemporary concerns and with a changing society. But it was
his grasp of the conundrumposed by the Soviet Union as putative
leader of world socialism that gained Ricoeur thegreatest respect.
In the May 1957 issue of Esprit his Le paradoxe politique
appeared,an essay that even today draws praise for its independence
and breadth. As usual helined up extremists on both sides (Hegel on
the side of the state, Marx on that of distrustor resentment),
insisting that both be given their due in a synthetic political
stance.More heretically, he chided Marx for having left politics
out of his 100 percentsocioeconomic analysis. This lacuna permitted
anyone (Lenin and Stalin, as it turnedout) to develop every sort of
political mechanism in the name of furthering Marxsgoals, including
the military oppression of Hungary in the current instance
[Ricoeur,Azouvi, and Launay 95]. Elaborating ideas Hannah Arendt
was making famous at justthis time (he would write the preface for
the French translation of The Human Condition),Ricoeur
distinguishes power, exercised vertically by strata and associated
with evil,from politics, a horizontal practice associated with
being together. He could notcountenance the paternalism of the USSR
at the time but adamantly refused the lure ofso-called American
democracy saturated with commercialism. While he practicedprecisely
the Personalism that was the legacy of Esprit from the 1930s on, he
developeda philosophical vocabulary to justify this third way.
This period of activism subsided in the 60s as Ricoeur found
himself engaged inall-consuming academic debates and in the
internal politics of the University of Paris.Quite unfairly he
became linked to the establishment, despite his quite progressive
ideas.Anyone who believed in institutions (and Ricoeur believes in
their inevitable importanceas well as their imperfection) was
suspect. More than one former intransigent radicalwho had loathed
Ricoeur in the days of the seizure of Nanterre later came to
appreciate,indeed to revere, him after rereading his many social
essays [PR 601]. Ricoeursconsistently thoughtful leftism, and the
action he has personally taken or supported inthe face of a range
of social causes, gain compound interest each year until its
worthstacks up well against the now devalued rhetoric of the
blustery firebrands of 1968.Since Dosse was schooled in that
generation, Paul Ricoeur: Les sens dune vie has theair of a penance
expiating the arrogance of an earlier period. This shift in the
tone ofacademic discourse can be measured by the ascendancy of
Emmanuel Levinas, whosereputation surely helped resuscitate the
prominence of his friend and colleague PaulRicoeur. From the 1930s
to the end of the century, both men submitted Germanphenomenology
(Husserl and Heidegger respectively) to the primacy of ethics and
justice,which they considered not corollaries to philosophy but its
very heart [Ricoeur,Autrement].
Paradigms and Positions
As recently as 1990, when Levinas characterized Ricoeurs thought
approvingly asphenomenological, the latter did not deny it
[Ricoeur, Aeschlimann, and Halprin
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3537]; on the other hand he has styled himself a sort of
post-Kantian, if only throughHusserl and Nabereven a post-Hegelian
Kantian, as I jokingly call myself [Ricoeur,Azouvi, and Launay 83].
The program of existential phenomenologyto graspprereflective
experience through reflectionoccupied the first phase of Ricoeurs
career,but it did so ambivalently. His early books on Marcel and
Karl Jaspers questioned theideal of the unity of the human person,
whether the itinerant view (Marcel) or thetragic view (Jaspers).
Even Sartres far more careful and complex writing ultimatelyfalls
prey, in Ricoeurs opinion, to an immature desire for unity.
Ricoeurs Kantianismemerges time and again to map the limits of
thinking in the murkier areas of humanexperience that phenomenology
is drawn to. Kant can be felt in Ricoeurs penchant forkeeping modes
of experience (invariably three of them) autonomous but
interacting.Both philosophers define the limits beyond which reason
cannot pass, while Kantvalidates the central place Ricoeur accords
imagination, the single faculty that animatesevery mode and every
concern.
Appropriately, the imagination was the focus of the course
Ricoeur prepared in hismountain retreat just after the war. Never
published as such, this syllabus would inflecthis writing for the
next half-century, both because of its topic and because of the
logic ofits exposition. In Ricoeurs outline, recovered and
presented by Dosse, everything beginswith a descriptive
phenomenology in the manner of Maine de Biran and, of
course,Sartre, so as to catch the operation of the imagination.
Ricoeur describes the structure ofsimple experiences of illusion
and then moves to ever more complex functions, fromdaydreaming to
art and religion. Having grasped the process from the inside,
Ricoeurthen moves outside, where Sartre refused to go,
deconstructing the imagination withwhatever disciplines claim to
explain its presence and its operations (sociology,psychology,
psychoanalysis). Then comes that third moment Ricoeur always
insistsupon, the moment of synthesis wherein the process (here the
imagination), despite thecritique it has undergone, instructs us in
its unique way. In this case a poetics reintegratesall levels and
all forms of the imagination. Poetics, the name for the study of
the specificityof imaginative texts, also serves, in the manner of
Kants Critique of Judgment, to justifyfaith in the validity of
taste and of reason, including that very critical reason that put
theimagination under suspicion.
Thus in 1947, before having yet published a book or named
hermeneutics as hismethod, Ricoeur displays in the embryo of a
syllabus what will become his idiosyncraticapproach. He also
displays his fundamental ethos in so adamantly refusing to
allowreflection on experience to get trapped in exclusive concern
with self. Always he woulddistribute self-concern across a field of
meaning, reference, and ultimately action, viaproductive encounters
with texts and other selves. While Ricoeur consistently
exhibitsthis method and approach on various topics, the particular
topic of the imagination mustbe privileged as the motor of
productivity in every instance. The imagination will
surfaceunmistakably in La mtaphore vive (1975) as that which pushes
language beyond itself,and it underwrites the value of narrative,
which after all is precisely a poetics oftemporality that thinks
beyond the aporias of reason. Kantian critique allows Ricoeur
toidentify aporias and to locate limits of thought, while poetics,
underwritten by Kantsthird Critique, restores, if not unity, then
at least the value of the human drive to attain it.
The inevitable thwarting of this persistent human drive had been
the core topic ofRicoeurs doctoral thesis. Under the global rubric
Philosophy of the Will, he beganpublishing his immense personal
philosophical project, volume one coming out in 1950as La
volontaire et linvolontaire (Freedom and Nature) with the second
part, Finitudeet culpabilit (Finitude and Guilt), coming a decade
later. These titles certainly partakeof the problematic tone of
existentialism, although it is Ricoeurs Kantian turn thathelps him
confront determinism and wrest from it some space for human beings
in our
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ability to synthesize inventiveness with lawfulness. (This
opposition returns again andagain in his thought, most notably in
La Mtaphore vive, where it is raised to the basicprinciple of
language use.) No theological compensation is offered for the
scandal oflimitation and guilt, the desolate condition in which
humans find themselves and whichis Ricoeurs goad to philosophize in
the first place. In the idiom of phenomenology, hedescribes
pre-human nature, that is, the state from which something like
human natureemerges, including various personal styles of
responding to limitation, from the mostconsensual to the most
rebellious. Ricoeur would say that all his later work, includinghis
books on Freud, on language, and on narrative identity, is anchored
in thisphenomenological description, which runs in parallel through
the three separate butinteracting spheres he adapts from Kant: the
spheres of knowledge, of action, and offeeling. In all three, the
human constitutes a range of values that can virtually be graphedon
two fundamental axes, that which runs from the particular (sense
perception) to thegeneral (concept, language) and that which runs
between origin and possibility, archand telos [see Klemm].
Ricoeurs later books will depend on, but break free of, the
convolutions ofintrospection that shape the usual course of
existential phenomenology. Late in the 1950she deliberately took
the step from personal to cultural experience and reflection whenhe
split Finitude et culpabilit in two: volume 1, titled Fallible Man,
remains in thereflective idiom, while volume 2, The Symbolism of
Evil, locates the fault line inhuman nature through an exegesis of
cultural expressions. Edging close to the work ofMircea Eliade,
highly popular at the time, he turned first to symbols and then to
mythsthat coordinate symbols into narratives. Although he
ultimately judged this foray to beunsophisticated, it initiated
what would become a lifelong series of detours en routeto a fuller
but always partial and perspectival comprehension of lack. Indeed,
ever after,Ricoeur would identify the route as a starting point and
reject the conceptual clarityof radical origin, insisting that
philosophy begin not at the beginning but in the midst ofthe
meanings all around it. Hence the primacy of interpretation.
In embarking on The Symbolism of Evil (1960), Ricoeur opted to
employ thevocabulary of poetics on the one hand and of anthropology
on the other, two of thehuman sciences that were coming to the fore
at just this moment and that he wouldneed to address head on. His
admiration for Merleau-Ponty, always high, soared in aeulogy he
composed in 1961 [see Lectures 2], which recognized Merleau-Pontys
audacityin supplementing philosophy with the disciplines of
linguistics, sociology, psychology,and history. Ricoeur took up
Merleau-Pontys baton in full knowledge that existentialismwas
ceding power to les sciences humaines, a paradigm shift visible in
all fields. Marxistswho had followed Sartre now had to adjust to
the new force of Louis Althusser. IndeedSartre was felt to have
been knocked off his position when in 1962 Claude
Lvi-Straussconcluded The Savage Mind (dedicated to the memory of
Merleau-Ponty) with theextraordinary epilogue History and
Dialectic.
Ricoeur, while never close to Sartre, might nevertheless have
been expected to takehis side, and indeed the editors of Esprit
campaigned to defend humanism against thehuman sciences in the name
of agency and freedom. But Ricoeur in effect adoptedMerleau-Pontys
expansive role in his interchanges with Lvi-Strauss. As Dosse
reportsit, Ricoeur looked not to debate Lvi-Strauss so much as to
apprentice in anthropologyand linguistics if only to emerge from
the cul de sac of The Symbolism of Evil. And so heconstituted a
Lvi-Strauss study group at Esprit. For several years running he
conductedcourses that minutely dissected the arguments and contents
of an anthropology ofAmerican Indians that posed as a study of
human nature in the universal sense. Alongthe way, Ricoeur schooled
himself deeply in the structural linguistics so crucial not justto
Lvi-Strauss but to Roland Barthes, A. J. Greimas, and Jacques
Lacan.
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diacritics / summer 2000 57
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Thus Ricoeurs 1967 riposte to Lvi-Strauss, Structure, Word,
Event, representsthe fruit of a deep and partially sympathetic
understanding of this alternative vision ofculture. His brilliant,
characteristic move in this seminal essay was to interpose a
termbetween the dyad langue/parole of Saussurian linguistics; that
term, mot, carriesthick traces of theology and history,
complicating what he saw as too simple a distinction.Every word,
Ricoeur points out, bears in its etymology the sediment of prior
uses thatamount to a history of experience. History can be
accounted for neither by structuralrules (langue) nor by an
accumulation of individual events (parole). Wordsles motsespecially
in their evolution, are what bear tradition, heritage, and the
credit humanbeings can draw on for a shared future. Structural
analysis of texts may be indispensableto an explanation of their
power to make meaning, but it is completely inadequate to thetask
of comprehending their import and consequence. This much he
retained from hisselective acceptance of Heidegger.
Ricoeurs opponents in this argument were not just the famous
names associatedwith les sciences humaines; they included
theologians and biblical scholars as well.Indeed one could read
Ricoeurs contestation with Lvi-Strauss, Greimas, Althusser,and
Lacan as preparation for the more lethal battle he fought for a
perspectival andpolyvalent view of the Bible and of religion
against absolutists on the one hand andrelativists on the other. As
has so often been the case in the life of a man for whom
alldiscourses interrelate, biblical hermeneutics had laid the
ground for, and was then thebeneficiary of, a renewed poetics. The
literary work became for Ricoeur the prototypeof the intersection
between the personal and the universal that marks his
theologicalconcerns. For both the scriptural text and the poetic
text can be considered fertile yetunfinished, open to a future that
readers find themselves drawn to forge throughinterpretation and
application. The literary work carries values released from the
controlof its author. Like a word, it can be cited and taken up in
distinct and quite differentmoments. Interpretation allows the poem
to function fully at a distance from the eventor intentions that
brought it about. Still, its force depends on its status as event,
both asrecord of a process of composition (subject to
psychoanalytic and ideological forces)and as goad to a process of
appropriation in which those who encounter it take it into
thefuture as part of their lives. Only its independence from any
actual event allows it toplay this role as virtual event. And that
independence results from its structuralorganization, the
understanding of which is precisely the goal of the human
sciences.Ricoeur recognizes what appear to be opposed approaches to
literature (includingphenomenological elaboration, structural
description and analysis, poetic interpretation,and historical
contextualization), while at the same time making these
approachesmutually interdependent in accounting for the richness of
phenomena that go to the rootof human experience, like literature
and religion.
Ricoeurs reputation beyond those drawn to the theological
reverberation of histhought took off with the 1965 publication of
De linterpretation: Un essai sur Freud(translated in 1970 as Freud
and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation). What a daringcareer
move this was. Caught within a self-justifying theological
discourse that underlayeven his foray into anthropological poetics,
The Symbolism of Evil, and sensing, alongwith Merleau-Ponty in his
final years, the entropy of phenomenology, Ricoeur abruptlyset out
on the unlikely detour posed by psychoanalysis. Freud stood out as
a challengeto his faith, his reason, his very sense of identity. To
his credit, Ricoeur did not shrinkfrom thinking through Freud to
the end. This meant locating the places where Freudianthought
stops, its ends. Ricoeur was maligned in France for failing to take
into accountFreuds legacy, particularly in Lacan. Indeed it was
Lacan who most vilified Ricoeur forthis omission, even though
Ricoeur attended Lacans seminars and did his best to havea dialogue
with a man who, in Dosses account, was interested mainly in
self-
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aggrandizement. But in the United States, where his book had
gestated as the 1964Terry lectures at Yale, Ricoeur became a most
approachable French philosopher. Ricoeurgave us a Freud that was
comprehensible, powerful, yet limited, as compared to LacansFreud,
whose thought became intimidating, incomprehensible, and
limitless.
Freud allowed Ricoeur to raise the question closed to
phenomenology concerningthat which lies beyond consciousness.
Husserl had made room for the unreflectedareas off the horizon of
every intuition of consciousness, but was constrained to
believethat such zones literally exist only to the extent that they
are available for eventual entryinto consciousness. Freuds
unconscious, however, is far more radical: irretrievableto
consciousness, it not only exists but controls the existence of the
conscious subject.Ricoeurs religious upbringing may have permitted
him to abandon the pride ofconsciousness, something unthinkable for
Husserl. He echoes St. Paul: Consciousnessfinds itself by losing
itself. It finds itself instructed and clarified after losing
itself andits narcissism [Ricoeur and Ihde 153]. One must give over
consciousness to the analystso as to receive in return another life
in abundance. This is the miracle of therapy, amiracle few have
experienced but which has been reported frequently enough to
bolsterthe belief of the faithful in the truth of the unconscious
and in the project of analysis.
Might Ricoeur accept the humiliations to the ego exacted by
psychoanalysis as aruse to convert the heathen [Ricoeur, Azouvi,
and Launay 90]? Dosses account allowsus to imagine this. For
Ricoeur claims that Freud, Marx, and a line of prophets ofextremity
[see Megill] stemming from Nietzsche have torn down every
institution,every monument of civilization, including the
institution of the self, leaving humanitywith nothing but the
movement of force and scattered elements of signification
[Ricoeurand Ihde 148]. And yet these prophets evince a heroic
embrace of a deeper truth thanthat whose edifice they have
shattered. The result is a gain for consciousness. TheNietzschean
overman, like the patient on the other side of psychoanalysis, has
gained acertain adulthood of consciousness in recognizing and
willing the loss of the dominanceof consciousness within existence.
It is at this point that Ricoeur brings Hegel to bear, ina move
that would haunt him for the next twenty-five years until the
renunciation ofHegel at the end of Time and Narrative. Hegels
developmental and suprapersonalPhenomenology of the Spirit
represents the countercurrent of Freuds regressive analysisof the
individual psyche. Where Freud traces experience to its infantile
elements, Hegeltraces the maturation of the Spirit from its happy
childhood phases in the figures ofthe Greek thinkers through its
troubled skeptical figures that precede the adulthoodreached in
Hegels own consciousness of Spirit. Ricoeur would locate in the
institutionsof culture both the irrational sources of symbols
(Freud mercilessly shows us these) andtheir fruits (Hegel promises
their intelligibility). Symbols are once again the privilegedsites
of both regression and progression, and of an analysis that breaks
them down intothe forces and the primitive meanings that gave rise
to them as well as into the possibilitieswith which their adult
formulations allow us to think. Freud may take Oedipus back
topatricide and incest, but Hegel recognizes in the blinded,
castrated, wounded ego ofOedipus the wisdom that emerges at
Colonus. Symbols provide the possibility of again of thought and of
consciousness, even as they insist on a dispossession of
theself.
A Thousand, or Just a Few Well-Sited Plateaus?
Gilles Deleuze has been muffled long enough in this article
which opened with hisname. And he must be groaning at the last
paragraph, Freud and Hegel epitomizing theenemies of free thought,
which it was his mission to liberate. To him Ricoeur must seem
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diacritics / summer 2000 61
caught on a tightrope like a circus monkey running back toward
Freuds archaeologyand forward toward Hegels teleology, destiny
driving him in both directions. And yetRicoeurs belief in the
openness of the symbol would attract Deleuze. Both men
willinglyrelinquish standard philosophy for the insights made
possible by the disreputableintellectual fruits of art and (for
Ricoeur at least) of religion. Even in the realm of art,however,
they disagree about the extent of the openness of the symbol that
tempts bothof them to think thought beyond consciousness. Insofar
as Ricoeur follows Freud, thesymbol gives onto an expanded human
nature, beginning with the immutable but hiddenstructure of the
unconscious that inclines us to be as we are. Deleuze refuses
theconstriction this implies. He rejects the primacy of nature, the
organic, the hidden. Insteadhe sings of the virtual, the
incompossible, the machinic. The Powers of the False arenot those
of the unconscious that have been lurking beneath the surface all
along, butthose that proliferateeven schizophrenicallyalong
contours of life only the barestfraction of which come to
consciousness and into reality. Deleuze makes us godsinsofar as we
participate in this spread of the possible. Ricoeurs devotion to
the expansionof meaning is driven by his faith in truths already
gained by his forebears in philosophy,by artists of every epoch,
and by contemporaries living and thinking differently butliving and
thinking in the selfsame universe, one that is in part shareable,
one that all ofus explore in our own fashion. When he announced on
television that Philosophy forme is an anthropology [Marquette],
Ricoeur meant to keep theological inquiry separatefrom the natural
inquiry of philosophy. But the term anthropology aptly suits his
wayof studying human being (including first of all himself) through
other human beingsand through their practices.
It should be evident, then, why, despite their wildly different
styles of thought andexpression, Ricoeur and Deleuze have both been
able to claim the interest of humanistsoutside the realm of
philosophy proper. His two-volume treatise Cinema 1 and Cinema2 has
made Deleuze essential reading in film studies, renewing that
discipline at a timewhen it was in danger of dissolving into merely
another site of cultural studies. Ricoeurhas tantalized literary
scholars in an analogous way. His lengthy detour into metaphorand
narrativefour large volumes appearing between 1975 and 1985offer a
sustainedreflection and analysis on the nature and potential of
literary discourse. Both men recruitimaginative and creative texts
to replace or supplement philosophical ones. Invariablythese are
drawn from the modernist paradigm. Deleuze showed himself an
incrediblyversatile consumer of films, art, and fiction, able to
write with genius on an extraordinarydiversity of difficult works.
Ricoeur evidently is also at home in the thicket of the finearts,
poetry, and even photography. Still, his practical criticism has
been confined tofairly predictable readings of Proust, Thomas Mann,
and Virginia Woolf in volume 2 ofTime and Narrative, choosing
novels that thematize his theses. His discussion of paintersremains
abstract. He pays homage to Czanne and van Gogh as men driven to
repaysome vague debt when after countless tortured attempts they
come to rest on a singularsolution to some singular knot of issues
that only their paintings allow them toexperience [Ricoeur, Azouvi,
and Launay 178]. Deleuze and Ricoeur acknowledge thatart achieves
universality when it is most particular, so particular that no
language, andcertainly no philosophy, could restate what it has
made intelligible.
Although he is personally drawn to nonfigurative painting and to
twelve-tone music,Ricoeurs main discussion of art relates to
narrative, where questions of identity andrepresentation are
central. His attitude toward representation would seem to sunder
himfrom Deleuze at the outset, for Deleuze has done more than
anyone to dethrone itsstatus in philosophy. The very word
representation acknowledges a prior and deeperreality that exacts
debts of fealty from the human all-too-human. Representation
curbscreativity in favor of knowledge and position; it provides a
fundamentally spatial model
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rather than an evolving, temporal one. Deleuzes critique updates
that of Bergson and ofphenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty who are
concerned with process and emergenceover clarity and the certain
recognition of states of affairs.
Ricoeur, on the other hand, has welcomed representation
precisely because itinevitably introduces what he takes to be the
inescapability of position. He is amongthose for whom (French)
philosophy fell into its original sin, egology, having beentempted
by the snake of consciousness which held out the apple, seemingly
natural andhealthy, of direct reflection on transpersonal problems.
But reflection is never simple.As soon as a representation is
engaged, the point of reflection of phenomenologybecomes merely
point-of-view, which Husserl hoped to neutralize via the
second(eidetic) reduction. Ricoeur, after finding an eidetic
approach unsatisfactory in his firstvolume of Philosophy of the
Will [Ricoeur xiv], accepted perspective as inevitable andadvocates
a hermeneutics wherein perspectives can be multiplied, crossed
over, andopposed in the midst of a cultural world whose horizons
shift with history. Representationsserve as heuristics for
knowledge and action. Some representations extend thought
beyondtheir apparent content to life itself. And representations
always work by extension.Metaphors and narratives, whether
fictional or historical, are representations aroundand through
which thought emerges. They form stepping stonesor, why not,
plateausin a trajectory of understanding that circles past the
aporias that inevitably open up infront of direct reflection. Here
Ricoeur crosses paths with Deleuze who likewise woulddislocate the
path of thought by means of the intercessors he loves to introduce
fromfar afield [Deleuze, Mediators].
Hegelian in spite of himself, Paul Ricoeurs plateaus are fewer
in number thanthose of Deleuze and Guattari. When asked about the
scope of philosophy by the son ofhis friend, Esprit editor
Jean-Marie Domenach, Ricoeur aphorized: Listen young man,philosophy
is really very simple. There are only two problems: the one and the
multipleand the same and the other [Dosse, PR 270]. But philosophy
has a history, becausethese insoluble problems are always raised in
discursive situations that themselves requirestudy. Hermeneutics,
it turns out, amounts to the careful, indebted exploration of
suchsituations, striving to understandthat is, to recover and
uncoverwhat must ever liebeyond the particular moments and motives
of our questioning and answering.Unsurprisingly, history and
fiction are the landscapes from whose most prominentplateaus
Ricoeurs hermeneutics takes flight. Philosophy is indebted to, and
at the serviceof, these textual practices by which the imagination
strives to bring coherence and theillusion of permanence to
ceaseless change.
This discourse of debt with which Ricoeur justified the
irreplaceable value of bothhistory and fiction may have come from
Emmanuel Levinas, with whom he interactedintensely after 1980
[Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3: 12425]. Lurking beneath
hisdiscussion of traces, cadavers, and forgetfulness is
unquestionably the Shoah, unavoidablein France in this period.
Ricoeurs Protestantism, sensitive to the coupled terms debitand
debt, is able to respond positively by invoking the notions of
credit andcredibility. He even seems to emphasize the economic
connotation behind a favoritephrase: Someone counts on me [Breuil].
For as he makes clear in a 1991 televisioninterview in the series
Presence Protestante, every promise derives from, contributesto,
and puts at risk the vulnerability of self, of other, and of
language [Marquette]. If Ibreak a promise, I make a mockery of the
self I pretended to be, I disrespect whomevermy broken word
injures, and I damage language, the chief institution and medium
throughwhich human beings extend themselves beyond the here and
now. Language stabilizesstates of affairs only if its propositions
are believed to apply beyond the moment of theirutterance. This is
as true, Ricoeur might argue, for deconstructive philosophy as
formarriage vows; both assume a debt to the institution of language
which makes whatthey state meaningful, and persistently so.
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diacritics / summer 2000 63
Deleuze has no patience with debts or promises, and certainly
not with a balancesheet of debits and credits. He would unmoor
philosophy from language altogether anddestabilize the subject so
as to release new energies and concepts that have been held incheck
by the repressive self. Nietzschean, he demands the overthrow of
common senseand common language on behalf of a living power which
runs through and beyond theself and which the self can help release
by letting go of self-consistency. Hence thepremium he placed on
schizophrenia, nomadism, and the false, all of which accumulateand
release power only by upsetting every institution that ties life to
predictability andsameness.
If he had it in him to be snide, Ricoeur would surely ridicule
in Deleuze a Continentaltendency to address problems as if from
scratch. Extreme positions play their role inRicoeurs thought too,
but it is a heuristic role; they serve as guides to thought,
barriersagainst which thought must rebound in its career toward the
true and the right. Extremistssuccumb to the hubris of believing
themselves at the source of whatever is valuable inphilosophy,
ready to jettison most or all other views from the outset. Ricoeur
insteadmodestly believes he has stepped into a world already made
meaningful by earlier thought.Indeed he believes we are born on a
moving walkway of thought, heading in a directionnot of our own
choosing [Breuil]. Agency comes into play first and mainly
asreconnaissance, literally re-cognizing our heritage, and deciding
what parts of it activelyto maintain. How then does one initiate a
decisive action or submit to a conversion,when one is always
already enmeshed in significance? The answer comes in the modeof a
hermeneutics, a reinterpretation and present-day application of the
already thought,the already written. Hermeneutic phenomenology
amounts to a tactic of retreat, reflection,deflection, and
redirection. Ricoeur sees himself more as a negotiator than an
originatorof ideas; or rather, in the idiom of La mtaphore vive,
his originality comes through asperspective. He allows utterly new
meaning to open up through his adroit andsometimes brilliant
maneuvering of concepts rather than through that pure creation
ofconcepts (crer des concepts) by which Deleuze and Guattari define
the genuinevocation of philosophy [11].
This manner of thinking and of living is most fully articulated
in the summary workof 1990, Ricoeurs masterpiece, Soi-mme comme un
autre (Oneself as Another).Painstakingly, Ricoeur develops
conceptions of the self deriving from both the English(analytic)
and the German (ontological) traditions before recovering the
narrativeself, the self as someone about whom a past and future can
be recounted and projected.This in turn permits him to engage in an
ethical discourse of self as agent in history.Retreat initiates,
but cannot complete, an inquiry brought about by doubts
concerningthe mysteries (Marcel) of identity and relationship. The
books wonderful title isolatesin its three English words the chief
targets of doubt and sources of faith that have orientedRicoeurs
interactions from the beginning. Radical doubt has always been
associatedwith a concern about the very existence and then the
intelligibility or accessibility ofanother. Later, turned on
oneself, skepticism grew into the enterprise ofpsychoanalysis.
Finally, deconstruction has dismantled the seeming transparence of
therelation between self and other, the innocent comme (as) that
stands for language,whose stability and authority cannot be taken
for granted.
Oneself as Another stitches a brilliant new pattern from the
unraveling cloth ofontology and epistemology. Once again, the
inextinguishable force of imagination comesto rescue freedom from
the dissolution of the human, this time by encouraging us toclaim a
certain identity (via the privileged term attestation) even if our
bodies havemutated and our circumstances, beliefs, and friends have
changed. We narrate suchchanges and become the character of our own
story, and we do so in a field of otherswith whom we literally
share the plot of history. And so Ricoeurs philosophy, which
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floats on the shifting seas of interpretation, finds its harbor
not in ontology orepistemology, but rather in aesthetics and
ethics, modes of behavior that we exerciseevery day and
circumstantially.
As he enters the new millennium, writingever writingRicoeur must
find itappropriate to salute history and its twin mechanisms,
memory and forgetting [Lammoire, lhistoire, loubli]. Forgetting
belongs to his recent meditations on justice,particularly in regard
to international and interracial violence. Forgetting allies
itselfwith forgiving so as to permit a beginning which acknowledges
the past but whichselectively applies the burden of heritage to the
present. At the level of the person,Ricoeurs Oneself as Another
took its title from Georges Bernanoss country priest,who wrote in
his journal: Grace means forgetting oneself; it means loving
oneselfhumbly, as one would any of the suffering members of Jesus
Christ [Oneself as Another24]. Of course as soon as one chooses a
particular suffering member to love (oneself,for example),
obsessions may follow, so that one records every movement of the
heartin a journal (Bernanos) or develops thousands of pages of
philosophy to honor andunderstand what one loves, even humbly
(Ricoeur). This is hardly forgetting oneself.
Ricoeur is, therefore, far more devoted to memory [Breuil].
Where Heidegger refinedhis senses and his speculative powers to
orient himself in a world into which he feltthrown, Ricoeur seems
to have been born reading traces of meaning in a worldoverflowing
with meaning. There is perhaps more Platonism in Ricoeur than has
everbeen noted; for Plato, the soul recovers itself by remembering
a primordial truth towhich it stands innately attached; for
Ricoeur, the person becomes itself in re-cognizinga heritage given
circumstantially at birth. History is the double movement first
ofunderstanding that heritage by interrogating its traces and
second of moving forwardfrom this particular stance to a future
that affects a world made up of ones contemporariesand successors.
History (personal and collective memory, assiduously
uncovered,interpreted, and debated) provides a limited number of
plateaus from which groups ofpersons (ones family, social circle,
nation) can become oriented so as to move toward ahorizon. All this
takes place in a climate of conflict, for access to the past and a
vision ofthe future are strictly perspectival. And perspectives
clash as we determine the existenceof the past (what is maintained
in the collective memory and what is forgotten), debatethe meaning
of that past, and negotiate a future that might maintain or break
from thepast. But if one treats oneself as another, if one is open
to metaphors and narratives thatshift perspectives, such clashes
contribute to the ever-struggling community ofunderstanding. La
mmoire, lhistoire, loubli appropriately crowns these
interlockingspeculations about the representation of the past. What
must surely be his ultimate projectstands at once as a professional
epistemological disquisition about the nature of
historicalknowledge, a rather phenomenological meditation on aging
and memory, and a paternalreflection on the civic responsibilities
at work in commemoration, forgiving andforgetting.
Dosse writes a triumphal biography in chronicling Ricoeurs rise
to what seems anultimate plateau of wisdom. Consecrated as the
philosophe de la Cit, Ricoeur hasachieved the right and the
responsibility to declaim magisterially on topics as immenseas
justice and history. Characteristically, however, he refuses to
adopt the confidentposture he might be thought to have earned. He
has turned to the topic of memory notonly because he now carries
within him so many decades of his own memories, norbecause he rues
the inevitable erosion of this faculty as he ages, but because
memorycan be seen as the precondition and the mechanism of both
identity and history, alwayshis major concerns.
The remorse he recently expressed at having neglected Bergson
all these years issymptomatic of a full-fledged self-critique:
Ricoeur believes he too quickly linked time
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to narrative and narrative to history, creating a short-circuit
of discourse that bypassedthe life of identity altogether. Beneath
all the propositions and declarations of narrativeand history
stands the glue of identity, the primary fastening, which is
memory, andwhich involves the lyrical, non-narrative genres that
express the self-constitution ofmemory in passive syntheses
[Ricoeur, Azouvi, and Launay 9192]. Ricoeur musthave in mind
something like Gabriel Marcels wonderful remarks on the integrity
ofmelody, which he takes straight from Bergsons arguments in Matter
and Memory[Marcel, Bergsonism and Music]. A melody (or a poem, in
Augustines classicalformulation of the same problem in On Christian
Doctrine) exists only as a whole eventhough it is given one sound
at a time. And so, what of the integrity of the listener whointuits
the whole thanks to the mechanism of primary memory, which holds
togetherelements that go together? By extension the listener
intuits his or her own coherence ofexistence. This occurs, Ricoeur
now intimates, as a precondition for the narrativeidentity that he
may have been too hasty to lay as the cornerstone of the self.
Behindnarrative identity lie micromechanisms of memory. And from
these grow the roots,trunks, branches, and flowers of our personal
and social histories.
In recognizing the dependence of culture on what are effectively
neurologicalprocesses, Ricoeur may have put himself in dialogue
with the brain scientists like Jean-Pierre Changeux [see Changeux
and Ricoeur], but more enticing is the potentialrendezvous with
Bergson and Deleuze. For Ricoeur needs memory to play a role
similarto Geist in Husserl, that which links intentionality and the
hyle of affect and sensation,and this brings him close to the
entire Bergsonian problematic. Those, like myself, whohave followed
Ricoeurs peregrinations over four decades, redirecting them
wheneverpossible toward the arts (in my case, the cinema) must
rejoice.
Deleuze, Ricoeur, and the Image of Cinema
From structuralism and psychoanalysis to theories of metaphor,
narrative, and history,Ricoeurs timing has preternaturally
anticipated the concerns of film theory. Yet he hashad nothing to
say about this, the art form of the century. Now, however, having
broachedthe obtuseness of the trace and zeroed in on the mechanism
of memory, Ricoeurs thoughtmust at last traverse, or be conscripted
to help organize, the field of the cinematic. Forthe cinema is
precisely an apparatus of memory, safeguarding as well as
manipulatingtraces of the past. It is also the most potent
narrational force of our time and unparalleledin the formation of
identities, those of stars and of spectators. Ricoeur may ignore
thecinema, but his close readers should not.
In a chapter entitled Figuration in Concepts in Film Theory
[Andrew 16869], Irecruited Ricoeurs dynamic view of mtaphore vive
to counter the more mechanicalstudy of cinematic tropes found in
Christian Metzs Imaginary Signifier. I argued thatfigurationthe
tracing or outlining of new contours of meaningcould occur at any
ofwhat I still take to be the three key stages of cinematic
signification: (a) the congealingof sensory stimuli into
representations, (b) the organization of representations into
arepresented world (narrative, descriptive, formal), and (c) the
rhetorical or fictionalargument implied by that world. Given his
own habits, Ricoeur ought to ratify the notionof stages in
cinematic signification (particularly the idea that there should be
three ofthem). The art of cinema he would surely lodge in the
metaphoric figuration possibleat each stage but generally
concentrated in one, depending on the mode or genre at play.That
was the extent of my use of Ricoeur in 1984.
Today, through him I would instead advance the role of memory
from first to last inthe full arc of the experience of cinema. For
only something like the primary fastening
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allows photograms to cohere into shots in the first place, and
shots to impress on us inpassive syntheses their nearly ineluctable
coherence. Next, memory maintains therepresented elements in mind
as their narrative or descriptive pattern emerges, and,finally, it
allows us to compare that pattern to other structures of
intelligibility, whethercommonly available ones (genre, auteur) or
those whose source is mysterious or brand-new and must be sought
out. In short, a phenomenology might describe thetransformation,
via memory, of sensations of sight and sound produced by
projectedfilm into time and narrative. These would then serve as a
prelude to the fictions andhistories on the screen, which Ricoeur
could undoubtedly address in his characteristichermeneutic
mode.
At a higher level of abstraction films provide experimental
solutions to the twoproblems of philosophy Ricoeur deems
fundamental: the one and the multiple, the selfand the other. The
one and the multiple is endemic to a medium caught between theaura
of originality and the mechanisms of reproduction, a medium where
the worksindividuality is established against the background of
genre, a medium through whicheach spectator senses a tension
between self and other in the semi-darkness of the movietheater. As
for the second fundamental problem, self is thematized in every
fiction filmvia processes of identification and by strategies of
the gaze, while the opacity of theindexthe photographic tracestands
as other, particularly that most unavoidable indexof alterity, the
human face in close-up on the screen.
The particular emphasis of each cinematic experiment, the stage
where itsfiguration expands into new territoryin short, the
difference it aims to make and thesameness it perpetuatessuggests a
typology of modes, periods, genres, and styles. Itwas to parse this
rich field of cinematic experimentation that Deleuze elaborated
thebaroque network of categories that comprises his two-volume
study of the medium. Inhis spirit, we might venture that classical
films develop equilibrium between the oneand the multiple (through
rhyming, redundancy, and repetition) and between self andother.
Postmodern films, as ahistorical amalgams of styles, may dissolve
the questionof identity through digitalization and often conflate
the self and the other in an orgy ofcitation and simulation,
whether in the key of nostalgia or of parody. Ricoeur feels mostat
home between these extremes, responding to artworks produced in the
mode ofmodernism. And it is modernist cinema that fills the corpus
Deleuze examines in hissecond volume, beginning with Italian
neorealism, where the disequilibrium of self andother is resolved
most often in favor of the other, the trace that dramatically
derailsevery effort to appropriate it. Where Ricoeur sanctions the
work of the imagination inboth fiction and history as it struggles
with and against the traces of a broken world,Deleuze celebrates
the fertility of a cinema freed from the anchor of a false
equivalencebetween the actual and the mental. The time-image grows
out of the inability of thesubject to come into phase with a
post-Holocaust, postatomic-bomb social and physicallandscape. And
it grows willy-nilly in a cinemascape where the virtual and the
actualare, to use the famous term he took from Leibniz,
incompossible [Flaxman 57].
But Deleuzes exciting formulation risks dropping off the
discursive table on theextreme edge of which it characteristically
teeters. So concerned with the utterly new,with the incompossible,
he has tempted his followers to treat history cavalierly, merelyto
engender any difference whatever. This at least is the danger that
makes me turn toRicoeurs putative project in film studies and,
taking a cue from his method, hold openboth the mediation of his
essentially hermeneutic mediation and Deleuzes insistenceon radical
creativity. Between these poles films may be most fertilely viewed
and valued.
To turn Ricoeurs mediation into an extreme may seem contrary
until one listens tothe messianic openness of his program. He would
vivify the future by revivifyingrepresentations (strong films, in
our example) that have given us our sense of the present.
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diacritics / summer 2000 67
At the antipode of Deleuzes Powers of the False, then, stands
Ricoeurs Powers ofthe Trace. These two comprise the fundamental
properties of the cinematic. If Deleuzehas emphasized fabulation
and virtual, Ricoeur is known as le fidle avec sammoire.
Since fidelity and memory should attend an art form based on The
Ontology of thePhotographic Image (the title of the great essay
with which Andr Bazin launchedmodern film theory in 1945), one can
imagine, in the place of Ricoeur, Bazin offeringDeleuze
encouragement and caution. Encouragement would come from
Bazinsfascination with geology, botany, and other natural processes
whose traces on film canlead to effects he was ready to call
surrealist and fantastic. Well before Deleuze,Bazin understood
cinematic fabulation to profit from its partly inhuman source. But
heargued that it should remain true to that source, and so would
surely have cautionedDeleuzians intoxicated by the nonorganic
infinity of the digital. When the virtual attainsparity with the
actual, cinema writes off its debt to the trace; then, floating
unanchoredin a sea of images of its own devising, cinema will have
abandoned its historical impulse.Heretofore, all films have
documented reality; as Godard said, echoing Bazin, the
mostfantastical fiction registers the faces of actors literally
traced on celluloid at such andsuch a time. Cinema, the art of the
modern era best theorized by Bazin, yokes historyand fiction.
Similarly, Ricoeur brilliantly argued in 1985 that the debt felt by
the historian(to traces left in the archive) corresponds to the
debt felt by the fabulator (to the ideawhose insistence, if not
whose truth, disciplines the process of creation and causes
suchagony when the results are just not right) [Time and Narrative
3: 192]. The cinema isthe site par excellence both of such debts
and of their commingling. The postwarmodernity of the art form,
agree Giorgio de Vincenti [1124] and Dominique Pani,arises from its
simultaneous gains in photographic realism (natural light,
locationshooting, and so forth) and fictional experimentation
(unreliable narrators, indiscernibilityof dreams and
flashbacks).
Deleuzes tastes and notions respond to these special powers of
the medium and theparticular power of films just emerging in the
wake of World War II, those that introducedbifurcated time. In his
second volume, Deleuze proclaimed the absolute novelty ofRenoirs Le
rgle du jeu, of Welless Lady from Shanghai, of Neorealism and the
NewWave. Such films open onto everything interesting in the modern
cinema. Deleuze drewon Bazins prescience in this, for it was Bazin
who, we have already noted, first tookWelles seriously, Bazin who
brought Rossellini to Paris for the astounding premiere ofPaisa