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 claimed
would be named after him, a century that began just as philosophy registered the
aftershocks 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 the
flat-bottom boat of academic philosophy by insisting that it look beyond its own discourse
for 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, I
invoke 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 claim
to Ricoeur, the real long-distance runner, who is now pressing his publications into the
new century, moving relentlessly beyond his exhausted reviewers. Last year, a fanfare
of publicity greeted La mmoire, lhistoire, loubli, another magisterial tome appearing
too late to be included in Franois Dosses intellectual biography or in my overview
here, which lifts off from that biography. Ricoeur, destined to keep writingunable to
conclude his conversation with philosophyhas outlasted Deleuze, whose notoriety
derives from the radical break he makes with the thought of our times, for his abrupt
deviations and more abrupt conclusions. Ricoeurs reputation rests seldom on anything
conclusive but instead on his persistent interaction with and deployment of so much of
that thought. By accident or by savvy design, Ricoeurs trajectory (initiated in the
phenomenological 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 to
each new endeavor, not believing in the radical break or the prefix post-.
Franois Dosse tracks Ricoeur in a magnificent account that places its subject in
relation to each of these movements. But Parisian academic fashion forms only one
facet of a life whose brilliance is refracted as well by theology, politics, and a remarkable
social network. The thickness of his life evidently provides Ricoeur the necessary ballast
to maintain his orientation on the stormy seas of intellectual debate. In fact, across a
span 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 that
both establishes their value and serves his own agenda. Ricoeur profits from the
productive tension that results, evenindeed, especiallywhen this brings about a
dislocation of his views. These exchanges inevitably leave his own ideas clearer, more
defensible, and invulnerable to charges of parochialism. Although Ricoeur concludes
his three-volume Time and Narrative with an aggressive chapter explicitly asking,

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Should We Renounce Hegel?, there is something deeply Hegelian about this strategy
of taking on, then managing to assimilate, all comers so as to emerge stronger. Ricoeur
may 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 antipathy
to this philosophe de ltat was immediate, total, and itself completely arrogant. As
for 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 a
multivolume treatise on temporality and fabulation, Deleuzes cinema books picking up
the 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 the
lead of Olivier Mongin, who finds them both to be supreme philosophers of time, yet
incompatible on the basic question of mediation with regard to time [Mongin 128].
Where Deleuzes books on the cinema proclaim the immediacy of time, Ricoeur insists
that time is unthinkable except as mediated, whether through fictional or historical
narrative. Mongin opposes Ricoeur and Deleuze by distinguishing the objects they
respectively champion (the rcit and the cinema), but I propose to drag Ricoeur to the
cinema, where he could have the effect of cultivating ideas about the film image (indeed
the idea of cinema) that Deleuze sowed in the first place. In doing so, I force a chemical
reaction that never catalyzed on its own, despite the proximity of these men, who certainly
must 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 a
hypothetical way, the yoking of such divergent philosophical styles. As a budding
philosopher and cinphile in the late 40s and into the 50s, involved in a complex way
with the then-reigning phenomenological paradigm, Deleuze must have paid special
attention to Andr Bazins great essays in Esprit, a journal whose rapport with
phenomenology was explicit, and whose guiding philosophical intelligence was Paul
Ricoeur. 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, particularly
drama. With Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Amede Ayfre writing about cinema in these
years, we should expect Ricoeur to have been intrigued by this art, which was, under
Bazins aegis, inflating its ambitions to the limit. And so I am permitted to imagine a
lost chapter in Dosses biography. It details the chance encounters among Ricoeur,
Deleuze, and Bazin at the Cinmathque Franaise or at Truffauts Cin-club de la
salle noire. The bifurcated temporality that both Ricoeur and Deleuze develop in the
1980s Bazin effectively wrote about in his 1950 Orson Welles, the first auteur study I
know of. As much as the pith of Proust, the complexly perspectival world of Welles
and of the modernist idea of cinema that flourished in postwar Pariscould have set
both Ricoeur and Deleuze on their paths, which would cross decades later on the question
of temporality.
Compared to Deleuze, Ricoeur has pursued his path in a patient and longsuffering manner, two of his many virtues. These complement the beatitude that The
meek 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 social
sciences, producing a high-minded, sententious kind of resistance. To calculate the impact
of his workaday ethic, it is enough to note that Ricoeur directed the thesis or served as
mentor to Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancire, Vincent Descombes,

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Jean-Franois Lyotard, and Michel de Certeau [PR 25455]. He has left his mark, and
more.
While the Protestant faith he has steadfastly professed may not have directed or
organized his strictly philosophical undertakings (a philosophical Christian rather than
a Christian philosopher, he circumspectly calls himself), it has decidedly affected his
reception in France and abroad. He was ignored for years, then vilified in Francebut
Christian intellectuals throughout Europe welcomed him. At his direst moment, after
the disaster he suffered at Nanterre in 1970, he accepted a three-year post at the Catholic
University of Louvain in Belgium. The crucial rapport that he has maintained with the
University of Chicago dates from the same period (teaching in the Divinity School
rather than in the department of philosophy, from which he always felt alienated even
when offering for them popular seminars in Continental thought). In Paris, by contrast,
Ricoeur endured the contempt of prestigious peers for keeping religion within the orbit
of his concerns. Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan refused to take
him seriously or to engage in the dialogue he always invites. Their immense influence
turned students away from reading him. He was taken to be a throwback to another age
of philosophy, addressing an audience of graying parishioners. When he was forced to
resign as dean of Nanterre University in 1970, it was as if this view had been officially
confirmed. At the same moment, Foucault emerged as a hero of the radical youth and
was elevated to a chair at the Collge de France, which he took in direct competition
with Ricoeur [PR 51718].
But the pendulum has swung the other way. English readers have been able to
register Ricoeurs reemergence in the past two decades through the instantaneous
translation of his books, the appearance of an 830-page compilation of his interchanges
with 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 Ricoeur
has been ever more prominent in the media and in public exchanges with high-profile
peers from the hard and social sciences. Increasingly, scholars in domains such as history
and cinema studies have cited him. And then in 1997 came Dosses nearly 800-page
Paul Ricoeur: Les sens dune vie. Dosse took on this project following his indispensable
two-volume History of Structuralism. Evidently in preparing that study he encountered
Ricoeur again and again as someone at odds with, or to the side of, the dominant trends
in postwar French intellectual life [Dosse interview]. Determining to readdress the period
through Ricoeur turns out to have been not only a fair but an astute decision, for Ricoeur
gives 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 round
out his picture of the past half-century, the man soon emerges in Dosses book as perhaps
its most responsive and responsible thinker. Given enough time and sufficient occasions,
Ricoeurs modesty and doggedness have been rewarded even in a country that prizes
ostentation and flair. This would be the hagiographic explanation: Ricoeur, philosopher
of will, has triumphed by sheer good will, not by the will to power. Dosse charts the
rise to power of Ricoeurs goodness, finding in his achievement of continuity an antidote
to the discontinuity of our age. But if Ricoeur has managed to engage intellectual fads
seriously, letting his own ideas be inflected by the signs of the times, a more structural
rather than biographical analysis would examine precisely those signs and those times,
finding it logical that the general malaise of French thought after poststructuralism and
particularly in a postcommunist period should provoke a return to ethics (as in Emmanuel
Levinas). From this perspective, what Dosse calls Ricoeurs consecration is merely
another moment in the self-propelled movement of fashion, and this biography forms a
continuation, not the obverse, of his volumes on structuralism.

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Empathy and Biography

The shape and style of this biography emulate the ethos of its central character. Dosse
dubs Ricoeur un matre penser, someone who unobtrusively elicits and extends
thinking; this, to distinguish him from the lionized matres penseurs of the last halfcentury, the fashion-model masterthinkers named Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Barthes,
Bourdieu, et al. [PR 600; Dosse interview]. The abundance of the books research and
the range of topics addressed in its seventy chapters try to match Ricoeurs own drive to
be comprehensive in each of his studies and in their accumulated thrust. Where most
biographies of intellectuals aim to account for the development of ideas in the events of
a life, Ricoeurs rather eventless life tempts Dosse to reverse the direction, explaining
the 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 the
empiricism of his first philosophy teacher in high school to a more sophisticated form
of the same philosophy in the work of the neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux, with
whom 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 cultural
field of reading and discussion. Personality amounts to a style of reading and
interpretation, a tailored trajectory of detours and displacements made in passing from
one knotty issue to another, always in search of solid ground. But personal identity, like
ontology, is an unfinished project, a constantly receding horizon that orients but does
not constitute a life. Dosse accepts Ricoeurs beliefas much an intellectual position as
a private desirethat the subject is best known indirectly. Deciding not to access Ricoeur
himself, he pursued his work from the outside, interviewing scores of those who have
known him, reading Ricoeur the reader. And he has done so with the same forthrightness
and generosity that characterize Ricoeurs reading and writing. No dramatic or secret
moments bring instant illumination to this life. Nothing is hidden, except, of course, the
truth itself, which the life is ever in search of. Ricoeurs strongest ideas involve narrative
identity, a fact that prompts Dosse to discover his subject only through encounters with
others, in a drama of decentering and contextualization, as Ricoeur expands and
transforms his thought, his concerns, and, if we can use the contested term, himself.
Dosse adopts Ricoeurs favored posture: by maintaining a forthright yet deflected
approach, he arrives at a second, or deliberated, naivet. Other biographers might have
dwelt psychoanalytically on Ricoeur the orphan of World War I, striving to grow into
the father whom that war took from him; or on the usurpation of his life by an interminable
program of academic labor. (We are told that he has the constitution to write twelve
hours a day on a routine basis.) But Dosse, except in one instance, triangulates the
personality of his subject, pinpointing his relation to one thinker after another. The
exceptional 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 something
he cannot assimilate to a higher good or to the order of understanding. This worst of
private tragedies changed his writing and his demeanor; yet, in Dosses account, it made
him 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 in
mind. Rarely calling upon arcane sources, Ricoeur returns to the traditionfrom Plato
and Aristotle to Heidegger and Austinto reorient mainstream philosophy by protecting
it from extremes. And he has consistently made use of philosophy to disentangle public
controversies and to plead for responsible action. Dosses long book lays out one

46

intellectual, political, religious, or pedagogical situation after another, locating Ricoeurs

need to respond, and then detailing that response through excellent summaries of his
texts. 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 left
Paris to help build a government in Hanoi only to return, after the Vietnam War, out of
favor, destitute, and without a country). Occasionally Dosse indulges our taste for gossip
of the high and the mighty, as when he details several egregious instances of Lacans
unpardonably haughty behavior toward the ingenuous Ricoeur. On the whole, however,
Ricoeurs devotion to the interplay and also to the fair play of ideas diminishes personal
and professional drama. Dosse is convinced (and he convinces us) that Ricoeurs approach
to the life of the mind, to life itself, is vigorously healthy. Regardless of the positions he
has upheld over the years (most of which, in Dosses survey, seem apropos, consistent,
and liberating, though seldom brilliant), his selflessly virtuous attitude, at once passionate
and reflective, has had a salubrious effect in a world where top intellectuals seem more
often to behave like politicians and celebrities.
As a public intellectual, Ricoeur is best defined by the situations into which he
inserted himself. Dosse parses his life into ten sections: the 1930s; the experience of the
prisoner-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 the
Sorbonne, 195764; facing up to the masters of suspicion (Althusser, Lacan, Lvi-Strauss,
Greimas), 196070; the adventure of the University at Nanterre, 196570; eclipse in
France and the detour through America, 197085; recognition and triumph; a philosopher
in the Cit. Each section contains chapters that highlight, in turn, the spheres of Ricoeurs
concerns: political and pedagogical conflicts, philosophical problems and challenges,
religious and theological issues, the extended family circle within which he has worked
and lived; international contacts. His has been a life of words, those of ancient thinkers
he has drawn on, of current thinkers he has promoted, of courses he has taught, of
controversial journal articles he has penned or reacted to, of memorable lectures he has
given and others he has attended. Over 1500 names show up in the index, a roster of
those 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 French
intellectuals who have struck up relations with one American university or another,
Ricoeur has profited most from the interchange. His years at Chicago have altered the
way 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 his
recent 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 a
dialogue with Asian philosophers and religious thinkers, wanting ever to multiply points
of 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 both
he and that interlocutor (whether ancient Greek or contemporary Japanese) have come
to address.
Ricoeurs hermeneutics constitutes a faith in the human quest for Being, as much
as a method for understanding questions posed of Being. In this Ricoeur edges close to
Bazins Ontology, wherein cinematography allows us to access reality, but only from
shifting and always finite perspectives. The art of making and watching films, like the
practice of interpretation, is a discipline of establishing and multiplying perspectives on
reality. 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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Ricoeur puts divergent views to work, setting them one against the other, charting
a route from one problematic to the next, as he keeps the dialogue of philosophy moving
forward. And so one finds in Dosses biographyand then supremely throughout
Ricoeurs oeuvreexceptionally clear recapitulations of key issues in Husserl, Freud,
Althusser, Greimas, Derrida, and many others. But Ricoeur is no encyclopedist. He
needs to cut cleanly to the center of the positions involved because his own position
encompasses the dialogue between, say, phenomenology and structuralism or between
semiotics and the theory of reference. His hermeneutics defines itself as a method to
break through the limits of positions and vocabularies. Something more, something
potentially liberating, becomes available to the understanding when vocabularies brush
up against one another. Sometimes, as in metaphor, one field is helpfully redescribed by
a foreign vocabulary (for example, mythology newly understood in the language of
structural linguistics); sometimes two vocabularies open onto a domain that neither
could access alone (historiography and narratology allowing a conception of narrative
identity). Ricoeur has had to counter insinuations of eclecticism. He would call his
displays of erudition strategic; they allow him either to triangulate his own emerging
views 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 undoubtedly
abetted by the sermons he was asked each Sunday to meditate on. While he dutifully
pursued high school and undergraduate philosophy courses, his nascent social and
religious imagination was ignited by the vibrant non-conformism of 1930s France.
Extracurricular philosophy for Ricoeur included Bergson on one side and the faddish
German philosophers on the other (Nietzsche, to be sure, followed by Husserl, Heidegger,
and the return of Hegel via Alexandre Kojves much-discussed courses). Where Deleuze
would resuscitate the Bergson and Nietzsche of the 1890s with the two wonderful books
he wrote in the 1960s, Ricoeur encountered Bergson as virtually a contemporary, indeed
as the author of Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, a best-seller when he
read 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 the
public, not with those who taught and studied at the Sorbonne. Although Ricoeur did
not directly study Bergson, many in his circle had felt his influence; and he could only
be impressed with a philosophy that dealt with pressing problems in an engaged, decidedly
nonscholastic style. Philosophy could, in short, be alive. Ricoeur set off from Rennes in
search of this life, first by moving to Paris, and then by looking outside the academic
environment dominated there by the lucubratory neo-Kantian Lon Bruschwicg, with
whom he wrote a masters thesis.
In Paris, Ricoeur found the vivacity he was looking for in Gabriel Marcel, whose
renowned 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 of
philosophical authority and that they deal with matters of existence, not method. Year
after year, political, social, religious, and aesthetic issues were presented by the
participants who thought them through without the support or clarification of canonical
formulations. 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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(Sartre would always disdain Marcel for his conversion to Catholicism, and perhaps
because 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 in
the freedom and moral seriousness of this fellowship Ricoeur presented his first genuinely
personal 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 justice
as more than a philosophical issue. Calvinist, he argued against Karl Barths Lutheranism
that Christianity must transform, not turn its back on, the world. Transformation should
move from reflection to action, he wrote in Hic et nunc, one of the short-lived leftist
journals on whose edges he hovered during the entire decade. A Protestant organ published
out of Andr Gides apartment, where Denis de Rougemont, one of its directors, was
living in 1936, Hic et nunc meant to serve as a site for intellectual transformation, like
the more radical ETRE and Terre nouvelle. The latter, a journal of revolutionary
Christianity, sported a cross as well as a hammer and sickle on its cover, and so was
condemned by the Vatican and Moscow alike. In one of its issues Ricoeur proclaimed
himself a pacifist who nonetheless must advocate intervention of the international left
on behalf of Republican Spain. In these complex days he drew closest to Esprit (founded
in 1932), establishing a relationship with Emmanuel Mounier that would flourish after
the war. Mounier represented something like Marcel in action.
But it was not just the pressing politics of the day that pushed Ricoeur beyond those
cozy Fridays at Marcels apartment. His commitment to the act of reading led him to
distrust the primacy of personal reflection that Marcel persistently advocated. The two
retained great affection for each other, however. Marcel was the first person to greet
Ricoeur upon his return from captivity in 1945, and it is to Marcel that in 1950 Ricoeur
dedicated the first volume of his own philosophy, Freedom and Nature. In the late 60s
they published a wonderful book together, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond. On the surface
a set of radio interviews of Marcel by Ricoeur, in fact this book constitutes a sympathetic
and productive dialogue, dialogue being the cast of thought and speech they mutually
uphold as primary.
Dialogue clarifies differences and filiations. While Ricoeur worries that Marcel
can be charged with murkiness and lack of method, no one can question his courage to
face philosophy bare-handed. The twin topics Marcel introduced in the second part of
his path-breaking Journal mtaphysique, and then pursued in later studies, The Mystery
of Being and Incarnated Thought, are scattered throughout Ricoeurs books and
become the focus of his essay on Marcel written in 1984 [Lectures 2 5053]. Ricoeur
has tried to answer to the depth of both mystery and body, but in a way that sheds on
them the brightest possible light, something Marcel, a man of music and literature as
much as a philosopher, never cared to do. Marcels existential phenomenology grows
out of his experience with art, which he felt could tell us more than pure philosophical
analysis about the topics that mattered to him, such as identity. In Bergonism and
Music, he described the figure of the theme as welling up from an anonymous past
in the music listener who intuits it and recognizes its aptness. Marcel describes this
quasi-past as not any particular section of a historical becoming, more or less explicitly
assimilated to a movement in space, such as a film sequence. It is rather the inner depths
of oneself . . . sentimental perspectives according to which life can be relived not as a
series of events but to the extent that it is an indivisible unity which can only be
apprehended 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 each
other 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 characterizes
not only our response to music but our relation to culture generally. We are born not to
create meaning from the isolated point of our existence (Sartre, Descartes); we are born
already belonging to meanings that we gradually discover, recognize, modify, make our
own in returning to. Marcel shared with Sartre the sense of the essential risk of
subjectivity, its insubstantiality, but Marcels faith waited in the expectation that this
risk would reap dividends of authenticity upon its maturation. Never self-confident in
its 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 vie
characterizes its subject, Ricoeur, as engaging meanings (sens) but only as someone
whose 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 every
zigzag, detour, and sudden breakthrough of his journey, since these all take place on the
immense map of philosophy with whose coordinates he, far more than Marcel, orients
himself. When faced with a problem, Ricoeurs characteristic first movement is
backwards, retreat. This term bears a prominent pedigree, Ricoeur adopting it from
Gabriel Marcel, who was ever suspicious of progressivism, positivism, scientism,
dialectical Hegelianism. Marcel counseled retreat when faced with a mystery, a
conundrum 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, before
leaping forward in a calculated risk of thought.
Marcels dramatic and highly personal manner of doing philosophy is bolstered by
a 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 style
of personal thought from the literal retreat that, as a nobleman, he was forced to make
during the French Revolution. Marcels Journal mtaphysique takes its cue from Maine
de Birans Journal intime, a sustained reflection on the inner life, beginning at what he
thought was the beginning: the sensations of the body responding to an exterior field of
objects and other selves [see Gouhier]. After a generation of the determinism of the
French philosophes, Maines recovery of free will within the material world (enacted
through corporeal powers of vision and movement) set the stage for Bergsons subsequent
elaboration of the topic at the end of the century in Matter and Memory.
Bergsons great book, which Deleuze championed all his life, which Marcel was
beholden to (he dedicated his Journal mtaphysique to Bergson), and which Ricoeur
contritely 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 century
later [see Changeux and Ricoeur]. He doesnt shrink from describing the human brain
as a relay between sensation and action, but crucially he adds that this relay works with
a built-in delay [Matter and Memory 30]. Consciousnessreflectiontakes place in
and as this delay when, faced with some situation in the present, layers within a volume
of memory are traversed and sampled before the organism adjusts its stance and reacts
to face the future. Marcel was struck by this image of consciousness as time spent in a
memory vault. He conceived of this vault, as did Bergson and Maine de Biran, in personal
terms, the self as unplumbed volume of depth. Ricoeur, who cites Marcel, Husserl, and
Maine 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

50

turn when conning experience. Libraries form second lines of retreat when inner resources
fail and we must think further and otherwise. Unlike Marcel, Ricoeur accorded direct
interior reflection little credit. How quick he is to burrow into the further recesses of the
library and from there into the meandering ideas of individual volumes. As he puts it,
hermeneutic distanciation is a variant of Husserls phenomenological epoch [Rflexion
faite 58], a way to achieve clarity and to depersonalize immediate experience.
The value and practice of retreat, surely ingrained early on in his religious education
and then in his formative discussions with Marcel, became Ricoeurs de facto mode of
existence 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 in
1940 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, the
Kantian phenomenologist who would remain a lifelong friend. Dosse paints a vivid
picture of this odd refuge of philosophy, supported by a modest library of donated books
that included the complete works of Karl Jaspers and the Ideen of Husserl. Ricoeur
made an interlinear translation of the latter, while he and Dufrenne systematically went
through the Jaspers, preparing a coauthored study that would come out in 1948. They
perfected their German and improvised lectures, Ricoeur extemporizing on Nietzsche
without notes at one memorable session. Once released, rather than throw himself like
most 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 refuge
for Jewish children during the war. Invited to teach in this idyllic community by Andr
Phillip, the charismatic social activist whom he had known in Protestant circles in the
30s, he effectively opted out of the postwar struggles for cultural power. Ricoeur in the
mountains, 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 finish
his doctoral thesis, his Husserl translation, and the Jaspers book (when Dufrenne came
to visit). He also tried out on very young students the courses he would soon give at his
first 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 rigorous
phenomenology of Husserl. Beyond Ideen and Husserls other published books, Ricoeur
could now study thousands and thousands of pages of the masters notes just uncovered
in a Belgian archive. Ricoeur staked his claim to become their principal overseer, a
position he would inherit from Merleau-Ponty. This was more than academic curatorial
work, for Husserls particularism formed the mentalist obverse of Marcels carnal
approach. While Ricoeur would ultimately recognize how different were the
phenomenologies they practiced, they equally contributed to founding a conception of
the person. Crucial here is Husserls doggedness in filling the interstitial zone between
intention and sheer sensation. When supplemented by his Phenomenology of Internal
Time 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 and
political ideas (he could not term it philosophy) of Mounier, without the latters realizing
it. 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 account
for the double alienation afflicting modern human beings (from the world and from
other people) [see Mounier]. Ricoeur grew very close to Mounier just before the latters
death in 1950 while Ricoeur was translating Husserls Ideen. Evidently Mounier hoped
to recruit a heavy-hitting philosopher, as he might a lawyer, to validate his social
movement 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 of
Personalism and its journal, Esprit, for which he began to write regularly and where he
found, as Dosse puts it, a collective intellectual identity of a community of hope [PR
57].
As with Marcel, Ricoeur believed he had to step beyond Husserl, but never beyond
Husserls desire to grasp life at its immediate points of contact. Modest, Ricoeur doubted
that he (or anyone) could fulfill this desire unaided. In fact, contra Marcel and contra
Husserl, he readily declared the need for precedent formulations, not so much to lean on
as to think with into the future. And so, although his philosophy is suspended between
the quest (modernist and Husserlian) to build things up anew and a belief (more
traditional) that mankind has ever confronted the selfsame problem of remembering
existencea problem Marcel encouraged everyone to pose as though for the very first
timeRicoeur has formalized what appears a most standard philosophical practice,
that of reading and interpreting earlier philosophers. Hermeneutics names the practice
he would eventually adopt to mediate problems that have been deliberately posed by
phenomenology as immediate. Hermeneutic phenomenology, at first an oxymoron, comes
to 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 remaining
authentically human. This aspiration he shares with Gadamer, though he invariably turns
toward the future and toward action, whereas Gadamers constant concern is with tradition
and the past.
The built-in cultural dimension of Ricoeurs philosophical program fits perfectly a
personality that thrives on dialogue and social concern. At Strasbourg from 1948 to
1956 he enjoyed fertile interaction with a close-knit group of colleagues and students,
in both philosophy and theology. He treasured good conversation about serious topics
in the classroom, in the extremely active Esprit study group, and in his religious
congregation. Building on the reservoir of reading notes and ideas accumulated during
his isolation in the 1940s, his courses grew in reputation and variety, as did his
publications. Called to the Sorbonne in 1957, he would leave forever the conventional
satisfactions of provincial university life for a far more consequential public arena.
In Paris, as Dosse recounts it, Ricoeur could not help but become involved in
contemporary social issues discussed in the journals he kept up with. He arrived at the
Sorbonne after having just lobbed into the public sphere three pieces on the response of
the West to China, which Dosse finds feeble but which indicate a new sense of
responsibility to the larger world of politics. Almost immediately came the Hungarian
uprising that split the left over Stalin; hardly had this storm diminished than the brutal
debate over Algeria escalated. Ricoeur took an immediate and forthright stand against
colonization; he found himself questioned by the police for hiding soldiers deserting
from that war. His name could be found on petitions, in theological debates, and on the
pages of a range of journals. His bibliography shows a surprising number of addresses
concerning topics as diverse as science, youth, internment camps, communism, and
Zionism [Hahn 64653].
In all this Esprit felt like his home; for there, in the spirit of a Personalism imbibed
through Husserl, Marcel, and Mounier, he could write without condescension on matters
at once philosophical and directly political. So closely did he identify with its principles
that in the late 1950s he would be thought of as the next director, Protestant though he
was. Esprit literally became his home in 1957 when he moved into Les Murs Blancs in
Chtenay-Malebray just to the south of Paris. Mounier had bought this lovely property
with its three buildings in 1939 and shared it with other Personalists. Even after a 1957
shake-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 generosity
sufficiently utopian to quiet the occasional conflicts of position and personality that
inevitably arose among the men, women, and dozen children who lived there in close
companionship.
Chtenay-Malebray effectively served as the editorial headquarters for Esprit, where
friends and adherents, often more than fifty strong, regularly gathered to planand to
exchange views ontopics the journal had decided to feature. Ricoeurs views invariably
put him on the left even by Esprits standards. In 1960 he took it upon himself to organize
an issue of the journal devoted to sexual mores, in order to bring Esprit into contact with
contemporary concerns and with a changing society. But it was his grasp of the conundrum
posed by the Soviet Union as putative leader of world socialism that gained Ricoeur the
greatest 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 he
lined up extremists on both sides (Hegel on the side of the state, Marx on that of distrust
or 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 percent
socioeconomic analysis. This lacuna permitted anyone (Lenin and Stalin, as it turned
out) to develop every sort of political mechanism in the name of furthering Marxs
goals, including the military oppression of Hungary in the current instance [Ricoeur,
Azouvi, and Launay 95]. Elaborating ideas Hannah Arendt was making famous at just
this 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 not
countenance the paternalism of the USSR at the time but adamantly refused the lure of
so-called American democracy saturated with commercialism. While he practiced
precisely the Personalism that was the legacy of Esprit from the 1930s on, he developed
a philosophical vocabulary to justify this third way.
This period of activism subsided in the 60s as Ricoeur found himself engaged in
all-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 importance
as well as their imperfection) was suspect. More than one former intransigent radical
who 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]. Ricoeurs
consistently thoughtful leftism, and the action he has personally taken or supported in
the face of a range of social causes, gain compound interest each year until its worth
stacks 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 the
air of a penance expiating the arrogance of an earlier period. This shift in the tone of
academic discourse can be measured by the ascendancy of Emmanuel Levinas, whose
reputation surely helped resuscitate the prominence of his friend and colleague Paul
Ricoeur. From the 1930s to the end of the century, both men submitted German
phenomenology (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 as
phenomenological, the latter did not deny it [Ricoeur, Aeschlimann, and Halprin

54

3537]; on the other hand he has styled himself a sort of post-Kantian, if only through
Husserl and Nabereven a post-Hegelian Kantian, as I jokingly call myself [Ricoeur,
Azouvi, and Launay 83]. The program of existential phenomenologyto grasp
prereflective experience through reflectionoccupied the first phase of Ricoeurs career,
but it did so ambivalently. His early books on Marcel and Karl Jaspers questioned the
ideal of the unity of the human person, whether the itinerant view (Marcel) or the
tragic view (Jaspers). Even Sartres far more careful and complex writing ultimately
falls prey, in Ricoeurs opinion, to an immature desire for unity. Ricoeurs Kantianism
emerges time and again to map the limits of thinking in the murkier areas of human
experience that phenomenology is drawn to. Kant can be felt in Ricoeurs penchant for
keeping modes of experience (invariably three of them) autonomous but interacting.
Both philosophers define the limits beyond which reason cannot pass, while Kant
validates the central place Ricoeur accords imagination, the single faculty that animates
every mode and every concern.
Appropriately, the imagination was the focus of the course Ricoeur prepared in his
mountain retreat just after the war. Never published as such, this syllabus would inflect
his writing for the next half-century, both because of its topic and because of the logic of
its exposition. In Ricoeurs outline, recovered and presented by Dosse, everything begins
with 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 of
simple experiences of illusion and then moves to ever more complex functions, from
daydreaming to art and religion. Having grasped the process from the inside, Ricoeur
then moves outside, where Sartre refused to go, deconstructing the imagination with
whatever disciplines claim to explain its presence and its operations (sociology,
psychology, psychoanalysis). Then comes that third moment Ricoeur always insists
upon, the moment of synthesis wherein the process (here the imagination), despite the
critique it has undergone, instructs us in its unique way. In this case a poetics reintegrates
all levels and all forms of the imagination. Poetics, the name for the study of the specificity
of imaginative texts, also serves, in the manner of Kants Critique of Judgment, to justify
faith in the validity of taste and of reason, including that very critical reason that put the
imagination under suspicion.
Thus in 1947, before having yet published a book or named hermeneutics as his
method, Ricoeur displays in the embryo of a syllabus what will become his idiosyncratic
approach. He also displays his fundamental ethos in so adamantly refusing to allow
reflection on experience to get trapped in exclusive concern with self. Always he would
distribute self-concern across a field of meaning, reference, and ultimately action, via
productive encounters with texts and other selves. While Ricoeur consistently exhibits
this method and approach on various topics, the particular topic of the imagination must
be privileged as the motor of productivity in every instance. The imagination will surface
unmistakably 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 of
temporality that thinks beyond the aporias of reason. Kantian critique allows Ricoeur to
identify aporias and to locate limits of thought, while poetics, underwritten by Kants
third 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 of
Ricoeurs doctoral thesis. Under the global rubric Philosophy of the Will, he began
publishing his immense personal philosophical project, volume one coming out in 1950
as La volontaire et linvolontaire (Freedom and Nature) with the second part, Finitude
et culpabilit (Finitude and Guilt), coming a decade later. These titles certainly partake
of the problematic tone of existentialism, although it is Ricoeurs Kantian turn that
helps 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 and
again in his thought, most notably in La Mtaphore vive, where it is raised to the basic
principle of language use.) No theological compensation is offered for the scandal of
limitation and guilt, the desolate condition in which humans find themselves and which
is Ricoeurs goad to philosophize in the first place. In the idiom of phenomenology, he
describes pre-human nature, that is, the state from which something like human nature
emerges, including various personal styles of responding to limitation, from the most
consensual to the most rebellious. Ricoeur would say that all his later work, including
his books on Freud, on language, and on narrative identity, is anchored in this
phenomenological description, which runs in parallel through the three separate but
interacting spheres he adapts from Kant: the spheres of knowledge, of action, and of
feeling. In all three, the human constitutes a range of values that can virtually be graphed
on two fundamental axes, that which runs from the particular (sense perception) to the
general (concept, language) and that which runs between origin and possibility, arch
and telos [see Klemm].
Ricoeurs later books will depend on, but break free of, the convolutions of
introspection that shape the usual course of existential phenomenology. Late in the 1950s
he deliberately took the step from personal to cultural experience and reflection when
he split Finitude et culpabilit in two: volume 1, titled Fallible Man, remains in the
reflective idiom, while volume 2, The Symbolism of Evil, locates the fault line in
human nature through an exegesis of cultural expressions. Edging close to the work of
Mircea Eliade, highly popular at the time, he turned first to symbols and then to myths
that coordinate symbols into narratives. Although he ultimately judged this foray to be
unsophisticated, it initiated what would become a lifelong series of detours en route
to 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 clarity
of radical origin, insisting that philosophy begin not at the beginning but in the midst of
the meanings all around it. Hence the primacy of interpretation.
In embarking on The Symbolism of Evil (1960), Ricoeur opted to employ the
vocabulary of poetics on the one hand and of anthropology on the other, two of the
human sciences that were coming to the fore at just this moment and that he would
need to address head on. His admiration for Merleau-Ponty, always high, soared in a
eulogy he composed in 1961 [see Lectures 2], which recognized Merleau-Pontys audacity
in supplementing philosophy with the disciplines of linguistics, sociology, psychology,
and history. Ricoeur took up Merleau-Pontys baton in full knowledge that existentialism
was ceding power to les sciences humaines, a paradigm shift visible in all fields. Marxists
who had followed Sartre now had to adjust to the new force of Louis Althusser. Indeed
Sartre was felt to have been knocked off his position when in 1962 Claude Lvi-Strauss
concluded The Savage Mind (dedicated to the memory of Merleau-Ponty) with the
extraordinary epilogue History and Dialectic.
Ricoeur, while never close to Sartre, might nevertheless have been expected to take
his side, and indeed the editors of Esprit campaigned to defend humanism against the
human sciences in the name of agency and freedom. But Ricoeur in effect adopted
Merleau-Pontys expansive role in his interchanges with Lvi-Strauss. As Dosse reports
it, Ricoeur looked not to debate Lvi-Strauss so much as to apprentice in anthropology
and linguistics if only to emerge from the cul de sac of The Symbolism of Evil. And so he
constituted a Lvi-Strauss study group at Esprit. For several years running he conducted
courses that minutely dissected the arguments and contents of an anthropology of
American Indians that posed as a study of human nature in the universal sense. Along
the way, Ricoeur schooled himself deeply in the structural linguistics so crucial not just
to Lvi-Strauss but to Roland Barthes, A. J. Greimas, and Jacques Lacan.

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Thus Ricoeurs 1967 riposte to Lvi-Strauss, Structure, Word, Event, represents

the fruit of a deep and partially sympathetic understanding of this alternative vision of
culture. His brilliant, characteristic move in this seminal essay was to interpose a term
between the dyad langue/parole of Saussurian linguistics; that term, mot, carries
thick 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 that
amount to a history of experience. History can be accounted for neither by structural
rules (langue) nor by an accumulation of individual events (parole). Wordsles mots
especially in their evolution, are what bear tradition, heritage, and the credit human
beings can draw on for a shared future. Structural analysis of texts may be indispensable
to an explanation of their power to make meaning, but it is completely inadequate to the
task of comprehending their import and consequence. This much he retained from his
selective acceptance of Heidegger.
Ricoeurs opponents in this argument were not just the famous names associated
with 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 and
polyvalent view of the Bible and of religion against absolutists on the one hand and
relativists on the other. As has so often been the case in the life of a man for whom all
discourses interrelate, biblical hermeneutics had laid the ground for, and was then the
beneficiary of, a renewed poetics. The literary work became for Ricoeur the prototype
of the intersection between the personal and the universal that marks his theological
concerns. For both the scriptural text and the poetic text can be considered fertile yet
unfinished, open to a future that readers find themselves drawn to forge through
interpretation and application. The literary work carries values released from the control
of its author. Like a word, it can be cited and taken up in distinct and quite different
moments. Interpretation allows the poem to function fully at a distance from the event
or intentions that brought it about. Still, its force depends on its status as event, both as
record 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 the
future as part of their lives. Only its independence from any actual event allows it to
play this role as virtual event. And that independence results from its structural
organization, the understanding of which is precisely the goal of the human sciences.
Ricoeur recognizes what appear to be opposed approaches to literature (including
phenomenological elaboration, structural description and analysis, poetic interpretation,
and historical contextualization), while at the same time making these approaches
mutually interdependent in accounting for the richness of phenomena that go to the root
of human experience, like literature and religion.
Ricoeurs reputation beyond those drawn to the theological reverberation of his
thought 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 daring
career move this was. Caught within a self-justifying theological discourse that underlay
even his foray into anthropological poetics, The Symbolism of Evil, and sensing, along
with Merleau-Ponty in his final years, the entropy of phenomenology, Ricoeur abruptly
set out on the unlikely detour posed by psychoanalysis. Freud stood out as a challenge
to his faith, his reason, his very sense of identity. To his credit, Ricoeur did not shrink
from thinking through Freud to the end. This meant locating the places where Freudian
thought stops, its ends. Ricoeur was maligned in France for failing to take into account
Freuds legacy, particularly in Lacan. Indeed it was Lacan who most vilified Ricoeur for
this omission, even though Ricoeur attended Lacans seminars and did his best to have
a 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 1964
Terry lectures at Yale, Ricoeur became a most approachable French philosopher. Ricoeur
gave us a Freud that was comprehensible, powerful, yet limited, as compared to Lacans
Freud, whose thought became intimidating, incomprehensible, and limitless.
Freud allowed Ricoeur to raise the question closed to phenomenology concerning
that which lies beyond consciousness. Husserl had made room for the unreflected
areas off the horizon of every intuition of consciousness, but was constrained to believe
that such zones literally exist only to the extent that they are available for eventual entry
into consciousness. Freuds unconscious, however, is far more radical: irretrievable
to consciousness, it not only exists but controls the existence of the conscious subject.
Ricoeurs religious upbringing may have permitted him to abandon the pride of
consciousness, something unthinkable for Husserl. He echoes St. Paul: Consciousness
finds itself by losing itself. It finds itself instructed and clarified after losing itself and
its narcissism [Ricoeur and Ihde 153]. One must give over consciousness to the analyst
so as to receive in return another life in abundance. This is the miracle of therapy, a
miracle few have experienced but which has been reported frequently enough to bolster
the 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 a
ruse to convert the heathen [Ricoeur, Azouvi, and Launay 90]? Dosses account allows
us to imagine this. For Ricoeur claims that Freud, Marx, and a line of prophets of
extremity [see Megill] stemming from Nietzsche have torn down every institution,
every monument of civilization, including the institution of the self, leaving humanity
with nothing but the movement of force and scattered elements of signification [Ricoeur
and Ihde 148]. And yet these prophets evince a heroic embrace of a deeper truth than
that whose edifice they have shattered. The result is a gain for consciousness. The
Nietzschean overman, like the patient on the other side of psychoanalysis, has gained a
certain adulthood of consciousness in recognizing and willing the loss of the dominance
of consciousness within existence. It is at this point that Ricoeur brings Hegel to bear, in
a move that would haunt him for the next twenty-five years until the renunciation of
Hegel at the end of Time and Narrative. Hegels developmental and suprapersonal
Phenomenology of the Spirit represents the countercurrent of Freuds regressive analysis
of the individual psyche. Where Freud traces experience to its infantile elements, Hegel
traces the maturation of the Spirit from its happy childhood phases in the figures of
the Greek thinkers through its troubled skeptical figures that precede the adulthood
reached in Hegels own consciousness of Spirit. Ricoeur would locate in the institutions
of culture both the irrational sources of symbols (Freud mercilessly shows us these) and
their fruits (Hegel promises their intelligibility). Symbols are once again the privileged
sites of both regression and progression, and of an analysis that breaks them down into
the forces and the primitive meanings that gave rise to them as well as into the possibilities
with which their adult formulations allow us to think. Freud may take Oedipus back to
patricide and incest, but Hegel recognizes in the blinded, castrated, wounded ego of
Oedipus the wisdom that emerges at Colonus. Symbols provide the possibility of a
gain of thought and of consciousness, even as they insist on a dispossession of the
self.

A Thousand, or Just a Few Well-Sited Plateaus?

Gilles Deleuze has been muffled long enough in this article which opened with his
name. And he must be groaning at the last paragraph, Freud and Hegel epitomizing the
enemies of free thought, which it was his mission to liberate. To him Ricoeur must seem

60

caught on a tightrope like a circus monkey running back toward Freuds archaeology
and forward toward Hegels teleology, destiny driving him in both directions. And yet
Ricoeurs belief in the openness of the symbol would attract Deleuze. Both men willingly
relinquish standard philosophy for the insights made possible by the disreputable
intellectual 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 both
of them to think thought beyond consciousness. Insofar as Ricoeur follows Freud, the
symbol gives onto an expanded human nature, beginning with the immutable but hidden
structure of the unconscious that inclines us to be as we are. Deleuze refuses the
constriction this implies. He rejects the primacy of nature, the organic, the hidden. Instead
he sings of the virtual, the incompossible, the machinic. The Powers of the False are
not those of the unconscious that have been lurking beneath the surface all along, but
those that proliferateeven schizophrenicallyalong contours of life only the barest
fraction of which come to consciousness and into reality. Deleuze makes us gods
insofar as we participate in this spread of the possible. Ricoeurs devotion to the expansion
of 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 but
living and thinking in the selfsame universe, one that is in part shareable, one that all of
us explore in our own fashion. When he announced on television that Philosophy for
me is an anthropology [Marquette], Ricoeur meant to keep theological inquiry separate
from the natural inquiry of philosophy. But the term anthropology aptly suits his way
of studying human being (including first of all himself) through other human beings
and through their practices.
It should be evident, then, why, despite their wildly different styles of thought and
expression, Ricoeur and Deleuze have both been able to claim the interest of humanists
outside the realm of philosophy proper. His two-volume treatise Cinema 1 and Cinema
2 has made Deleuze essential reading in film studies, renewing that discipline at a time
when it was in danger of dissolving into merely another site of cultural studies. Ricoeur
has tantalized literary scholars in an analogous way. His lengthy detour into metaphor
and narrativefour large volumes appearing between 1975 and 1985offer a sustained
reflection and analysis on the nature and potential of literary discourse. Both men recruit
imaginative and creative texts to replace or supplement philosophical ones. Invariably
these are drawn from the modernist paradigm. Deleuze showed himself an incredibly
versatile consumer of films, art, and fiction, able to write with genius on an extraordinary
diversity of difficult works. Ricoeur evidently is also at home in the thicket of the fine
arts, poetry, and even photography. Still, his practical criticism has been confined to
fairly predictable readings of Proust, Thomas Mann, and Virginia Woolf in volume 2 of
Time and Narrative, choosing novels that thematize his theses. His discussion of painters
remains abstract. He pays homage to Czanne and van Gogh as men driven to repay
some vague debt when after countless tortured attempts they come to rest on a singular
solution to some singular knot of issues that only their paintings allow them to
experience [Ricoeur, Azouvi, and Launay 178]. Deleuze and Ricoeur acknowledge that
art achieves universality when it is most particular, so particular that no language, and
certainly 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 and
representation are central. His attitude toward representation would seem to sunder him
from Deleuze at the outset, for Deleuze has done more than anyone to dethrone its
status in philosophy. The very word representation acknowledges a prior and deeper
reality that exacts debts of fealty from the human all-too-human. Representation curbs
creativity 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 of
phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty who are concerned with process and emergence
over clarity and the certain recognition of states of affairs.
Ricoeur, on the other hand, has welcomed representation precisely because it
inevitably introduces what he takes to be the inescapability of position. He is among
those for whom (French) philosophy fell into its original sin, egology, having been
tempted by the snake of consciousness which held out the apple, seemingly natural and
healthy, of direct reflection on transpersonal problems. But reflection is never simple.
As soon as a representation is engaged, the point of reflection of phenomenology
becomes merely point-of-view, which Husserl hoped to neutralize via the second
(eidetic) reduction. Ricoeur, after finding an eidetic approach unsatisfactory in his first
volume of Philosophy of the Will [Ricoeur xiv], accepted perspective as inevitable and
advocates a hermeneutics wherein perspectives can be multiplied, crossed over, and
opposed in the midst of a cultural world whose horizons shift with history. Representations
serve as heuristics for knowledge and action. Some representations extend thought beyond
their apparent content to life itself. And representations always work by extension.
Metaphors and narratives, whether fictional or historical, are representations around
and through which thought emerges. They form stepping stonesor, why not, plateaus
in a trajectory of understanding that circles past the aporias that inevitably open up in
front of direct reflection. Here Ricoeur crosses paths with Deleuze who likewise would
dislocate the path of thought by means of the intercessors he loves to introduce from
far afield [Deleuze, Mediators].
Hegelian in spite of himself, Paul Ricoeurs plateaus are fewer in number than
those of Deleuze and Guattari. When asked about the scope of philosophy by the son of
his 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 multiple
and the same and the other [Dosse, PR 270]. But philosophy has a history, because
these insoluble problems are always raised in discursive situations that themselves require
study. Hermeneutics, it turns out, amounts to the careful, indebted exploration of such
situations, striving to understandthat is, to recover and uncoverwhat must ever lie
beyond the particular moments and motives of our questioning and answering.
Unsurprisingly, history and fiction are the landscapes from whose most prominent
plateaus Ricoeurs hermeneutics takes flight. Philosophy is indebted to, and at the service
of, these textual practices by which the imagination strives to bring coherence and the
illusion of permanence to ceaseless change.
This discourse of debt with which Ricoeur justified the irreplaceable value of both
history and fiction may have come from Emmanuel Levinas, with whom he interacted
intensely after 1980 [Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3: 12425]. Lurking beneath his
discussion of traces, cadavers, and forgetfulness is unquestionably the Shoah, unavoidable
in France in this period. Ricoeurs Protestantism, sensitive to the coupled terms debit
and debt, is able to respond positively by invoking the notions of credit and
credibility. He even seems to emphasize the economic connotation behind a favorite
phrase: Someone counts on me [Breuil]. For as he makes clear in a 1991 television
interview in the series Presence Protestante, every promise derives from, contributes
to, and puts at risk the vulnerability of self, of other, and of language [Marquette]. If I
break a promise, I make a mockery of the self I pretended to be, I disrespect whomever
my broken word injures, and I damage language, the chief institution and medium through
which human beings extend themselves beyond the here and now. Language stabilizes
states of affairs only if its propositions are believed to apply beyond the moment of their
utterance. This is as true, Ricoeur might argue, for deconstructive philosophy as for
marriage vows; both assume a debt to the institution of language which makes what
they state meaningful, and persistently so.

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Deleuze has no patience with debts or promises, and certainly not with a balance
sheet of debits and credits. He would unmoor philosophy from language altogether and
destabilize the subject so as to release new energies and concepts that have been held in
check by the repressive self. Nietzschean, he demands the overthrow of common sense
and common language on behalf of a living power which runs through and beyond the
self and which the self can help release by letting go of self-consistency. Hence the
premium he placed on schizophrenia, nomadism, and the false, all of which accumulate
and release power only by upsetting every institution that ties life to predictability and
sameness.
If he had it in him to be snide, Ricoeur would surely ridicule in Deleuze a Continental
tendency to address problems as if from scratch. Extreme positions play their role in
Ricoeurs thought too, but it is a heuristic role; they serve as guides to thought, barriers
against which thought must rebound in its career toward the true and the right. Extremists
succumb to the hubris of believing themselves at the source of whatever is valuable in
philosophy, ready to jettison most or all other views from the outset. Ricoeur instead
modestly 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 direction
not of our own choosing [Breuil]. Agency comes into play first and mainly as
reconnaissance, literally re-cognizing our heritage, and deciding what parts of it actively
to 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 mode
of 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 originator
of ideas; or rather, in the idiom of La mtaphore vive, his originality comes through as
perspective. He allows utterly new meaning to open up through his adroit and
sometimes brilliant maneuvering of concepts rather than through that pure creation of
concepts (crer des concepts) by which Deleuze and Guattari define the genuine
vocation of philosophy [11].
This manner of thinking and of living is most fully articulated in the summary work
of 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 narrative
self, 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 concerning
the mysteries (Marcel) of identity and relationship. The books wonderful title isolates
in its three English words the chief targets of doubt and sources of faith that have oriented
Ricoeurs interactions from the beginning. Radical doubt has always been associated
with a concern about the very existence and then the intelligibility or accessibility of
another. Later, turned on oneself, skepticism grew into the enterprise of
psychoanalysis. Finally, deconstruction has dismantled the seeming transparence of the
relation 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 of
ontology and epistemology. Once again, the inextinguishable force of imagination comes
to rescue freedom from the dissolution of the human, this time by encouraging us to
claim a certain identity (via the privileged term attestation) even if our bodies have
mutated and our circumstances, beliefs, and friends have changed. We narrate such
changes and become the character of our own story, and we do so in a field of others
with 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 or
epistemology, but rather in aesthetics and ethics, modes of behavior that we exercise
every day and circumstantially.
As he enters the new millennium, writingever writingRicoeur must find it
appropriate to salute history and its twin mechanisms, memory and forgetting [La
mmoire, lhistoire, loubli]. Forgetting belongs to his recent meditations on justice,
particularly in regard to international and interracial violence. Forgetting allies itself
with forgiving so as to permit a beginning which acknowledges the past but which
selectively 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 oneself
humbly, as one would any of the suffering members of Jesus Christ [Oneself as Another
24]. 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 heart
in a journal (Bernanos) or develops thousands of pages of philosophy to honor and
understand what one loves, even humbly (Ricoeur). This is hardly forgetting oneself.
Ricoeur is, therefore, far more devoted to memory [Breuil]. Where Heidegger refined
his senses and his speculative powers to orient himself in a world into which he felt
thrown, Ricoeur seems to have been born reading traces of meaning in a world
overflowing with meaning. There is perhaps more Platonism in Ricoeur than has ever
been noted; for Plato, the soul recovers itself by remembering a primordial truth to
which it stands innately attached; for Ricoeur, the person becomes itself in re-cognizing
a heritage given circumstantially at birth. History is the double movement first of
understanding that heritage by interrogating its traces and second of moving forward
from this particular stance to a future that affects a world made up of ones contemporaries
and successors. History (personal and collective memory, assiduously uncovered,
interpreted, and debated) provides a limited number of plateaus from which groups of
persons (ones family, social circle, nation) can become oriented so as to move toward a
horizon. All this takes place in a climate of conflict, for access to the past and a vision of
the future are strictly perspectival. And perspectives clash as we determine the existence
of the past (what is maintained in the collective memory and what is forgotten), debate
the meaning of that past, and negotiate a future that might maintain or break from the
past. But if one treats oneself as another, if one is open to metaphors and narratives that
shift perspectives, such clashes contribute to the ever-struggling community of
understanding. La mmoire, lhistoire, loubli appropriately crowns these interlocking
speculations about the representation of the past. What must surely be his ultimate project
stands at once as a professional epistemological disquisition about the nature of historical
knowledge, a rather phenomenological meditation on aging and memory, and a paternal
reflection on the civic responsibilities at work in commemoration, forgiving and
forgetting.
Dosse writes a triumphal biography in chronicling Ricoeurs rise to what seems an
ultimate plateau of wisdom. Consecrated as the philosophe de la Cit, Ricoeur has
achieved the right and the responsibility to declaim magisterially on topics as immense
as justice and history. Characteristically, however, he refuses to adopt the confident
posture he might be thought to have earned. He has turned to the topic of memory not
only because he now carries within him so many decades of his own memories, nor
because he rues the inevitable erosion of this faculty as he ages, but because memory
can be seen as the precondition and the mechanism of both identity and history, always
his major concerns.
The remorse he recently expressed at having neglected Bergson all these years is
symptomatic of a full-fledged self-critique: Ricoeur believes he too quickly linked time

64

to narrative and narrative to history, creating a short-circuit of discourse that bypassed

the life of identity altogether. Beneath all the propositions and declarations of narrative
and history stands the glue of identity, the primary fastening, which is memory, and
which involves the lyrical, non-narrative genres that express the self-constitution of
memory in passive syntheses [Ricoeur, Azouvi, and Launay 9192]. Ricoeur must
have in mind something like Gabriel Marcels wonderful remarks on the integrity of
melody, which he takes straight from Bergsons arguments in Matter and Memory
[Marcel, Bergsonism and Music]. A melody (or a poem, in Augustines classical
formulation of the same problem in On Christian Doctrine) exists only as a whole even
though it is given one sound at a time. And so, what of the integrity of the listener who
intuits the whole thanks to the mechanism of primary memory, which holds together
elements that go together? By extension the listener intuits his or her own coherence of
existence. This occurs, Ricoeur now intimates, as a precondition for the narrative
identity that he may have been too hasty to lay as the cornerstone of the self. Behind
narrative 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 neurological
processes, Ricoeur may have put himself in dialogue with the brain scientists like JeanPierre Changeux [see Changeux and Ricoeur], but more enticing is the potential
rendezvous with Bergson and Deleuze. For Ricoeur needs memory to play a role similar
to 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, who
have followed Ricoeurs peregrinations over four decades, redirecting them whenever
possible 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 has
had nothing to say about this, the art form of the century. Now, however, having broached
the obtuseness of the trace and zeroed in on the mechanism of memory, Ricoeurs thought
must at last traverse, or be conscripted to help organize, the field of the cinematic. For
the cinema is precisely an apparatus of memory, safeguarding as well as manipulating
traces of the past. It is also the most potent narrational force of our time and unparalleled
in the formation of identities, those of stars and of spectators. Ricoeur may ignore the
cinema, but his close readers should not.
In a chapter entitled Figuration in Concepts in Film Theory [Andrew 16869], I
recruited Ricoeurs dynamic view of mtaphore vive to counter the more mechanical
study of cinematic tropes found in Christian Metzs Imaginary Signifier. I argued that
figurationthe tracing or outlining of new contours of meaningcould occur at any of
what I still take to be the three key stages of cinematic signification: (a) the congealing
of sensory stimuli into representations, (b) the organization of representations into a
represented world (narrative, descriptive, formal), and (c) the rhetorical or fictional
argument implied by that world. Given his own habits, Ricoeur ought to ratify the notion
of stages in cinematic signification (particularly the idea that there should be three of
them). The art of cinema he would surely lodge in the metaphoric figuration possible
at 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 in
the 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 in
passive syntheses their nearly ineluctable coherence. Next, memory maintains the
represented elements in mind as their narrative or descriptive pattern emerges, and,
finally, it allows us to compare that pattern to other structures of intelligibility, whether
commonly available ones (genre, auteur) or those whose source is mysterious or brandnew and must be sought out. In short, a phenomenology might describe the
transformation, via memory, of sensations of sight and sound produced by projected
film into time and narrative. These would then serve as a prelude to the fictions and
histories on the screen, which Ricoeur could undoubtedly address in his characteristic
hermeneutic mode.
At a higher level of abstraction films provide experimental solutions to the two
problems of philosophy Ricoeur deems fundamental: the one and the multiple, the self
and the other. The one and the multiple is endemic to a medium caught between the
aura of originality and the mechanisms of reproduction, a medium where the works
individuality is established against the background of genre, a medium through which
each spectator senses a tension between self and other in the semi-darkness of the movie
theater. As for the second fundamental problem, self is thematized in every fiction film
via processes of identification and by strategies of the gaze, while the opacity of the
indexthe photographic tracestands as other, particularly that most unavoidable index
of alterity, the human face in close-up on the screen.
The particular emphasis of each cinematic experiment, the stage where its
figuration expands into new territoryin short, the difference it aims to make and the
sameness it perpetuatessuggests a typology of modes, periods, genres, and styles. It
was to parse this rich field of cinematic experimentation that Deleuze elaborated the
baroque network of categories that comprises his two-volume study of the medium. In
his spirit, we might venture that classical films develop equilibrium between the one
and the multiple (through rhyming, redundancy, and repetition) and between self and
other. Postmodern films, as ahistorical amalgams of styles, may dissolve the question
of identity through digitalization and often conflate the self and the other in an orgy of
citation and simulation, whether in the key of nostalgia or of parody. Ricoeur feels most
at home between these extremes, responding to artworks produced in the mode of
modernism. And it is modernist cinema that fills the corpus Deleuze examines in his
second volume, beginning with Italian neorealism, where the disequilibrium of self and
other is resolved most often in favor of the other, the trace that dramatically derails
every effort to appropriate it. Where Ricoeur sanctions the work of the imagination in
both 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 equivalence
between the actual and the mental. The time-image grows out of the inability of the
subject to come into phase with a post-Holocaust, postatomic-bomb social and physical
landscape. And it grows willy-nilly in a cinemascape where the virtual and the actual
are, to use the famous term he took from Leibniz, incompossible [Flaxman 57].
But Deleuzes exciting formulation risks dropping off the discursive table on the
extreme edge of which it characteristically teeters. So concerned with the utterly new,
with the incompossible, he has tempted his followers to treat history cavalierly, merely
to engender any difference whatever. This at least is the danger that makes me turn to
Ricoeurs putative project in film studies and, taking a cue from his method, hold open
both the mediation of his essentially hermeneutic mediation and Deleuzes insistence
on 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 to
the messianic openness of his program. He would vivify the future by revivifying
representations (strong films, in our example) that have given us our sense of the present.

66

At the antipode of Deleuzes Powers of the False, then, stands Ricoeurs Powers of
the Trace. These two comprise the fundamental properties of the cinematic. If Deleuze
has emphasized fabulation and virtual, Ricoeur is known as le fidle avec sa
mmoire.
Since fidelity and memory should attend an art form based on The Ontology of the
Photographic Image (the title of the great essay with which Andr Bazin launched
modern film theory in 1945), one can imagine, in the place of Ricoeur, Bazin offering
Deleuze encouragement and caution. Encouragement would come from Bazins
fascination with geology, botany, and other natural processes whose traces on film can
lead 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 he
argued that it should remain true to that source, and so would surely have cautioned
Deleuzians intoxicated by the nonorganic infinity of the digital. When the virtual attains
parity with the actual, cinema writes off its debt to the trace; then, floating unanchored
in 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 most
fantastical fiction registers the faces of actors literally traced on celluloid at such and
such a time. Cinema, the art of the modern era best theorized by Bazin, yokes history
and 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 idea
whose insistence, if not whose truth, disciplines the process of creation and causes such
agony when the results are just not right) [Time and Narrative 3: 192]. The cinema is
the site par excellence both of such debts and of their commingling. The postwar
modernity of the art form, agree Giorgio de Vincenti [1124] and Dominique Pani,
arises from its simultaneous gains in photographic realism (natural light, location
shooting, and so forth) and fictional experimentation (unreliable narrators, indiscernibility
of dreams and flashbacks).
Deleuzes tastes and notions respond to these special powers of the medium and the
particular power of films just emerging in the wake of World War II, those that introduced
bifurcated time. In his second volume, Deleuze proclaimed the absolute novelty of
Renoirs Le rgle du jeu, of Welless Lady from Shanghai, of Neorealism and the New
Wave. Such films open onto everything interesting in the modern cinema. Deleuze drew
on Bazins prescience in this, for it was Bazin who, we have already noted, first took
Welles seriously, Bazin who brought Rossellini to Paris for the astounding premiere of
Paisa, Bazin who consecrated his final years to a magnificent study of Renoir, and
Bazin who fathered the New Wave. In sum, he was intimate with the time-image in the
very course of its appearing.
Thus the onset of Deleuzes dual career as philosopher and cinephile in the 1940s
and 50s coincides with the origin of the time-image he would later celebrate. Deleuze
went seriously to the movies during the era of auteurism at Cahiers du cinma, and the
Cahiers legacy is apparent in his attention to directors, to their style and importance,
and in his genuinely fantastical aspirations for cinema. In the Anglo-American academic
community, Deleuzes film books have been treated as an ingenious, obsessive, maniacal
system of images with little apparent social relevance. His advocates, it is true, often
extend his brilliant explorations of the audiovisual texture of films, denigrating narrative
and reference; seldom do Deleuzians attend to the historical interplay of films, save for
establishing adjacent films from which the one under consideration breaks free in the
pure power of its spontaneous creation.
It is here that Ricoeur, under the anachronistic tutelage of Bazin, might enter as
philosophe de la Cit du cinma. For Franois Dosses encompassing biography
inspires me to retain Ricoeur as a model of responsibility to the films of the past, to the

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traces of a more distant past films are able so powerfully to register, and to the work of
filmmakers who refigure those traces so as to build the sort of cinematic sphere we now
inhabit, and the social sphere we legitimately dream of.

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