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The Faces of Violence in Paul Ricoeur Silvia Cristina GABRIEL1 Using as theoretical framework C. A. J. Coadys legitimist and structural theories of violence, we will explore Paul Ricoeurs legacy on the subject. First, we will consider violence from an ethical and moral angle. Secondly, we will approach its political dimension. Our contention is that Ricoeur defends an asymmetrical dialectic between the legitimist and structural theories, in which the former acquire intelligibility only within a broad concept of violence akin to Hannah Arendts. Thirdly, we will examine violence in relation to time. We will make reference to the epoch-making events of historical communities and to the destiny of violence in imposed forgetting and difficult forgiveness. We will conclude with a brief account of the merits and the partly unresolved questions inside Ricoeurs work. *** I. Introduction After claiming that violence is as confusing a concept as it is central for any significant discussion in moral and political life, Coady marks two big theories around this notion.2 The first, related to conservative policies viewpoints, will uphold legitimizing arguments, which define violence as the illegitimate use of force.3 The second, associated with the political left wing, will support a broad concept of violence, bordering structural violence,4 according to which violence would run in tune with every form of social injustice. Coady remarks that despite their differences, they both fall in with an overmoralization of the concept. Concept which, in his opinion, ought to be much less ethically or morally crammed to avoid evading the axial issue of violence and to come to a politically useful definition of it. Without denying the autonomy of the political field, defended by Paul Ricoeur in his well-known article The Political Paradox (1957),5 not only here but also in Ethics and Politics (1958)6 and Oneself as Another (1990)7 does the author propose to speak in terms of the intersection of ethics and politics. In that sense he claims that the political realm extends that of ethics by assigning to it a sphere of exercise. 8 In fact, if for Paul Ricoeur state of law is the realization of the ethical intention in the political sphere,9 he could hardly subscribe to a position such as Coadys in which any evaluative definition of violence would prove evasive regarding the core of the issue of violence as a phenomenon and would, in addition, become politically useless. In view of the above described, in this work we intend to delineate Ricoeurs philosophical legacy on violence. First we will inscribe it within the field of ethics and morality, terms that will be dealt with later on (section II). Secondly, we will focus on the specifically political dimension of violence (section III). Lastly, and given that for Ricoeur political philosophy is engulfed within Philosophy of History, which is haunted, in turn, by the aporia of political evil,10 we will track violence dilemmas in relation to time (section IV). We will finish this article by attempting at assessing the merits and partially unresolved issues within Ricoeur's work (section V).

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II. Violence in the sphere of ethics and moral. Before setting about the specifications violence acquires in the ethical and moral dimension, we must be clear on the fact that by convention, for Ricoeur both terms are not exchangeable. They both acquire a technical character. While by ethics the author means the aim of an accomplished life,11 morality points to the articulation of this aim in norms characterized at once by the claim to universality and by an effect of constraint.12 This convention clears up immediately when Ricoeur links ethics to the Aristotelian teleological legacy and morality to Kantian deontological tradition.13 Far from supporting strict orthodoxy, Agustn Moratalla is right in claiming that his teleologism is, at the same time and indissolubly, deontologism.14 A moral deontologism which is subordinated to the ethical aim of the good life, but which operates as its essential complement. Where does this need for an ethical goal crossed by the Kantian idea of norm, of moral law, derive from? It is precisely here that Ricoeur replies that the very fact of violence constitutes the primary circumstance in the transition from a teleological to a deontological point of view.15 What is to be perceived as violence in so much as to require good life the goal of the teleological level to be subjected to the level of the dutiful, the obligatory mainstay of the deontological level? It is here that Ricoeurs debt to Hannah Arendt, who states Violence [] is distinguished by its instrumental character, 16 becomes apparent. As John Wall explains, also in this context Violence is meant [for Ricoeur] as a broad term referring to any practice in which persons are instrumentalized for an alien or fragmenting teleological purpose.17 It is in the face of this thread of instrumentalism whose possibility of manifestation come to surface in the teleological level where not only cooperation but also confrontation situations may arise that due respect to people is raised as stated in the second formulation of the Kantian categorical imperative. Let us recall it: Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.18 The aim of this passage through morality that ethics undertakes qualified at this instance as naive is to establish reciprocity on the very space where just by resorting to this ethics all figures of violence are bound to be triggered. As a matter of fact, in this first level of ethics, and given that every interaction may bear a basic dissimetry between the power exerted by one will over another, we would be exposed, Ricoeur claims, from theft, rape, psychological cruelty, deception, etc. to exploitation, torture and homicide. But for Ricoeur Kantian morality does not substitute Aristotelian ethics because according to the universal idea of humanity, present in the second formulation of the categorical imperative, otherness states the author is prevented from deploying itself by the universality that encircles it.19 That is, the Kantian turn around the engulfing idea of humanity hinders opening to intersubjectivity to otherness, in short, to the plurality of people accounted for by Arendt in The human condition.20 This intrinsic difficulty of Kantian norms turns morality into a mere instance of limited effectuation, which ought to be perfected through the final recourse of morality to ethics.21 It is this final recourse of deontological morality to teleological ethics now turned into critical ethics that would guarantee the recognition of positive values belonging to the historical and communitarian contexts of the realization of these same rules.22

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The author thus faces the antagonism between the universalist and contextualist theoretical position, related to the search for a philosophical foundation of human rights. It is in this area that Ricoeur ventures on a sort of practical mediation to be in charge of overcoming the antinomy between universalism and contextualism, which the current debate on human rights keeps oscillating between.23 This practical mediation is entrusted to the Aristotelian labour of phronesis, taken here as the practical wisdom of moral judgement in situation. III. Violence in the political sphere. The perpendicular structure of politics. In Oneself as Another Ricoeur states, on one hand, that our problem is not to add a political philosophy to moral philosophy24 so much so that he claims the following: [Hegelian] Sittlichkeit would then no longer denote a third agency, higher than ethics and morality, but would designate one of the places in which practical wisdom is exercised, namely, the hierarchy of institutional mediations.25 On the other hand, he then confesses: Hegel's philosophical project in the Philosophy of Right remains very close to my own views, to the extent that it reinforces the claims directed against political atomism []. To this extent, [] the notion of Sittlichkeit [] has never ceased to instruct us.26 But then, such as we anticipated in the Introduction, Ricoeur had held that the political extended ethics by assigning it a field of exercise, the state thus becoming the realization of the ethical intention in the political sphere. Likewise, many years before he had endorsed Eric Weil's statement that Political Philosophy is the very movement coming from morality, engulfing it as a starting point and overcoming it in a theory of the state. 27 We should, therefore, come to the conclusion that, granted there are in fact elements for a theory of state in Ricoeur's work, there is also, in consequence, an overcoming of ethics and morality towards an, at least, inchoative political philosophy. What we should ask ourselves is what Ricoeur understands state to mean. At this point he upholds Weil's formula that the state is the organization of a historical community; organized as state, the community is capable of making decisions.28 Leaving aside the richness this definition entails, Ricoeur is clear in advocating that Weil's formulation focuses on the rational form when it comes to defining the state. This rational form highlights what the author calls the horizontal tie of wishing to live together. 29 This horizontality is immediately set in terms of equation with Arendt's formula to define power as the human ability not just to act but to act in concert .30 Nonetheless, Ricoeur thinks there is more to Weil's formula than to Arendt's claims. Arendt contested Max Weber's well-known definition: the state is the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of the legitimate physical violence within a particular territory.31. Before this definition, Arendt replies that Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.32 Weil's advantage regarding Arendt's position consists of the incorporation of a voluntarist dimension of the state, absent in Arendt. This is the reason why Ricoeur assigns the state a perpendicular

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structure, in which the horizontal level of the rational form is crossed through by a vertical one, precisely the one of force or, to quote Ricoeur, the one of the residual violence that Max Weber had in mind when he said that the state is the recourse to legitimate force as a final resort.33 In fact, much as towards the end of his life Ricoeur might have said the vertical relation of authority [] constitutes a thorn in the flesh of an entreprise like my own34 on no account does he desist from admitting that violence,35 although its darkest one, is a defining feature of the state and of politics. Although in The Political Paradox he had already noticed that the reasonability inherent to the political sphere structuring of human reality does not take place outside the realms of politics conquest, exercise and conservation of authority - operating in turn as locus of political evil, in La critique et la conviction (1995) he reformulates this idea by saying that from a philosophical point of view, politics is an advanced form of rationality, but one which also includes an archaic form of irrationality.36 Given the above, we can so far conclude that, on one side, a spirit of reconciliation between the broad and legitimist theories on violence referred to in the Introduction emerges from these developments. A kind of reconciliation presented as an asymmetrical or imperfect dialectic in the sense that the intelligibility of resorting to legitimate violence, that is, the irrational moment, is tributary of the rational form or of the power Arendt speaks of and regards as the only truly inherent feature of the political communities existence. In sum, the state would ultimately lie in a certain fragile convergence where the Weberian force or legitimate violence is in relation of subordination and complementarity at a time with the Arendtian form or power. On the other side, much as the appeal to legitimate violence may be regarded as a thorn, this does not prevent Ricoeur from holding, keeping aloof from Arendt, that if the vertical relation be entirely absorbed within the horizontal relation [] perhaps this would also be the end of the political.37 Why should the absence of a hierarchy constitute the downfall of the political, seen as, we insist, a reasonable organization? First, because for Ricoeur the state encompasses at least one elementary form of violence: the punitive violence or criminal punishment.38 Second, because the other side of this rationality is, says Ricoeur: the residue of founding violence [] the trace left by the violence of the founders; for, basically, there is probably no state that was not born out of violence.39 This sombre side of the state is what Ricoeur calls the tradition of authority, tradition which in Power and Violence (1988)40 he attributes to Arendt herself on defending her from Habermas critique about her claim that the legitimacy of power derives for her, as well as for Gadamer, from the authority of tradition.41 Last, because in The Paradox of Authority (1995) Ricoeur remarks that power as referred to by Arendt may endure only if the horizontal axis crosses the vertical axis of authority as thematized by Weber.42 In view of the fragile and quite vanishing character of action and, therefore, of power following Arendt's definition of power as acting in concert -, Ricoeur remarked as far back as in Power and Violence that the politician is expected to ensure action has the endurance and strength it usually lacks.43 In other words, in front of power seen by Arendt as co-action born out of the human faculty of action - authority constitutes, says Ricoeur, the most stable element, since it represents permanence, endurance or, we might just as well say, resilience.44 IV. Violence in time. Wounded memory, imposed forgetting and difficult forgiveness

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In the previous section we made a mere marginal reference to the concept of founding violence whereby Ricoeur understands basically conquest, usurpation, forced marriage or warlike feats of conquerors. This topic is taken over in La lectura del tiempo pasado: memoria y olvido (1999) [The Reading of the Past: Memory and Forgetting]. On approaching the figure of the wounded memory, Ricoeur observes that one of the sources of vulnerability is the place of violence in the founding of identities, mainly collective identity.45 After associating collective memory, as well as history, with violence and after agreeing with Hobbes in founding political philosophy on violence, 46 Ricoeur states the following: there is no historical community that has not arisen out of what can be termed an original relation to war.47 These epoch-making events of a community and its members identity awareness, constitute in turn a tremendum fascinosum, whose counterpart, the tremendum horrendum, the author had already anticipated in Time and Narrative, Vol 3 (1985) because loathing is the negative form of veneration.48 Horror concludes Ricoeur is inverted veneration.49 To the extent that history ethical neutralization is neither possible nor desirable in these epochmaking events. This founding violence, where the glory and admiration of some is the obverse side of the horror and humiliation of others, is a compelling reason for Ricoeur to propose the fictionalization of history in this work. Before the unhappy pretence of the assessment neutrality of historical knowledge, the author claims that fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and to weep. 50 Fiction, the same as the metaphorical trope Ricoeur examined in The Rule of Metaphor (1975), introduces events in the sensitive, intuitive and vivid form of the image; and in this fashion block the way of the elusive character of the pastness of the past51 of those violent events that must never be forgotten.52 In Memory, History, Forgetting (2000), this wounded memory finds its parallel in the imposed forgetting. In front of political disorder experienced as a threat to social peace, amnesty is depicted as the suspension of violence. But Ricoeur points out that because of this disruption amnesty implies institutional forgetting, touches the very roots of the political, and, through it, the most profound and most deeply concealed relation to a past that is placed under an interdiction53. Therefore, if ethical neutralization contributes, as we have seen, to denying the memory of founding violence, amnesty keeps a phonetic and semantic affinity with the amnesia imposed in relation to the crimes committed during periods of seditious violence. Now then, Ricoeur thinks that whereas amnesty seeks reconciliation and civil peace, its proximity to amnesia through the imposed forgetting intercepts the dialectics of seditious violence and forgiveness. Forgiveness that must not be obliging, lenient or indulgent if it tries to contribute to the healing of the wounded memory.54 In short: it must be a difficult forgiveness. For Ricoeur, this difficult forgiveness, far away from the imposed forgetting dictated by amnesty, implies some active forgetting capable of establishing a subtle borderline between amnesia and infinite debt.55 In all: difficult forgiveness would imply a certain act of faith set between imposed forgetting and infinite debt which could be read as a credit we give to past violence to avoid its recurrence in the future. V. Conclusion

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As anticipated in the Introduction, we will conclude this paper with a brief assessment of the achievements and partially unresolved matters around violence as presented in Ricoeur s work. First, within its merits stands a serious attempt at mediating in the realms of morality and ethics, between universalist claims and community limitations affecting the philosophical principle of human rights, through his proposal of the universals in context. Among the unresolved topics lies the evasive character of these inchoative universals. Ricoeurs intention of reconciling Aristotelian phronesis with Hegelian Sittlichkeit through Kantian Moralitt,56 can be challenged following Martha Nussbaum as she questioned him as follows: What is the lesson taught us by the plays concluding appeal to practical wisdom (to phronein)? How can there be good deliberation in a situation in which all the altermatives involve doing violence to an important value?57 Especially when Nussbaum herself reminds us that The first thing that tragic phronein shows us, for Ricoeur as for Hegel, is the one-sidedness or partiality of the competing principles.58 Second, it is worth noting the virtue behind Ricoeurs position on avoiding the unilaterality that Arendts and Webers proposals around the political and the state fall into. Along this line of thought, his lack of qualms about standing for an ortogonal or perpendicular structure for the political and the state in which the rational form of living with or coaction is crossed by the irrational thorn of the legitimate force proves plausible. And if it proves plausible, it is because its program cannot be unilaterally associated with either conservative fundamentalism or radical political left wing. Among some unfinished matters, in his early works lies the aspiration of articulating a political philosophy whose effectuation is set aside in his late production, in an enigmatic, incomprehensible way. All the more incomprehensible when he, at times, comes to the point of urging us to make use of legitimate state violence to put an end to violence once and for all.59 Finally, it is noteworthy how original he is in stating the fictionalization of history as an iconic device capable of preventing historical communities from forgetting founding violence, that is, forgetting that foundational violence eventually legitimized by the respective states of law. This fictionalization also operates as a solution to restore politics, not at the expense of seditious violence amnesty-amnesia or imposed forgetting, but through difficult forgiveness. Among the drawbacks, the attempt at explaining difficult forgiveness, regarded as an act of faith, within a supra-ethics Ricoeur associates with economy of the gift. An economy characterized by the victory of the logic of superabundance over the logic of equivalence or the reciprocity characteristic of daily ethics.60 Bringing difficult forgiveness closer to the economy of the gift turns the former into a super erogatory or samaritan act, unconditionality ending up as its attribute. 61 We believe this poetics of love (agape) Ricoeur inscribes difficult forgiveness in should open further up to the language of justice.62 In that sense, we consider Tzvetan Todorov's idea of bringing exemplary memory together with justice a better way to restore politics through hard forgiveness.63 Thus, facing the unconditionality of forgiveness, we believe that conditioning difficult forgiveness to comparison, analogy and generalization inherent instances in Todorov's notion of exemplary memory would better guarantee that when it comes to forgiving we have in fact learnt from the past. Especially when, ultimately, it is all

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about learning how to root out the multiple and multiform faces violence strikes us with throughout time.

Translated from Spanish to English by Mara Viviana Matta. See Coady, C.A.J, Violence, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version: 1.0, London. 3 Max Weber incarnate this legitimism. See Max Weber Political Writings, ed. by Peter Lasssman and Ronald Speiers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 4 See Galtung, J., Violence, Peace and Peace Research, in Journal of Peace Research, 1969, Vol. 6 n. 2, pp. 167-191; id. Cultural Violence, in Journal of Peace Research, 1990, Vol. 27 n. 3, pp. 291-305. 5 Ricoeur, Paul, The Political Paradox, in Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, Trans. Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern University press. 1965, 247-70. 6 Ricoeur, Paul, Ethics and politics, in Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, Trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 7 Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, Trans. Kathleen Blamey, The University of Chicago Press, 1992. 8 See Ricoeur, Paul, Ethics and politics. 9 Ibid. 10 V. Ricoeur, Paul, The Just, Trans. David Pellauer, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2000. 11 Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself, p.170. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Moratalla, Agustn Domingo, Introduction, in Ricoeur, Paul, Lo justo, Spanish Trans. Agustn Domingo Moratalla, Caparrs Editores, Madrid, 1999, p. 13. 15 Ricoeur, Paul, The Just, p. xvii 16 Arendt, Hannah, On violence, Harcourt, Brace, 1969. p. 48. 17 Wall, John, Moral Meaning. Beyond the Good and the Right, in John Wall, William Shweiker, and David Hall (eds.), Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, London, Routledge, 2002, p. 53. 18 Kant, Immanuel, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Trans. James W. Ellington), Hackett, 1993. p. 36. 19 Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself, p 226 20 See Arendt, Hannah, The human condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 8. 21 Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself, p 171 22 Ibid. p. 274 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 250. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., pp. 25455. 27 Ricoeur, Paul, La philosophe politique d'Eric Weil, in Paul Ricoeur, Lectures 1 - Autour du politique. Paris, Seuil, 1991, p. 96. 28 Eric Weil, La philosophie politique, Paris, Vrin, 1984, 131, cited in Ricoeur, Ethics and Politics, p. 330. 29 Paul Ricoeur, Critique and conviction: conversations with Franois Azouvi and Marc de Launay, Trans Polity Press, Columbia Univerity, 1998, p. 99. 30 Arendt, Hannah, On Violence, p. 46 31 Max Weber, The Profession and Vocation of Politics, in Max Weber, Political Writings, ed. by Peter Lasssman and Ronald Speiers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 310-11. 32 Arendt, Hannah, On Violence, p. 70. 33 Paul Ricoeur, Critique and conviction, p. 98. 34 Ricoeur, Paul, The Course of Recognition, Trans. David Pellauer, Harvard College, 2005, p. 212. 35 Violence which in this work is attenuated when called right to command. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid.
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See Ricoeur, Paul, State and Violence, in Paul Ricoeur, History.... 234-46. Ibid. 40 Ricoeur, Paul, Pouvoir et violence, in Paul Ricoeur, Lectures 1, pp. 20-42. 41 See Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, London: Sheed & Ward, 1996. 42 See Ricoeur, Paul, Les paradoxes de lautorit, in Philosophie, Bulletin de Liaison des professeurs de philosophie de lacadmie de Versailles, C.R.D.P. , n 7, fvrier 1995. 43 Ricoeur, Paul, Pouvoir et, p. 40. 44 Ibid. 45 Ricoeur, Paul, La lectura del tiempo pasado: memoria y olvido, Spanish Trans. Gabriel Aranazueque, Madrid, Arrecife, 1999, p. 31. 46 Ricoeur says: Hobbes was not wrong in making political philosophy arise out of an original situation in which fear of violent death pushes man out of the state of nature into the bonds of a contractual pact, that, first of of all, guarantees him security, ibid., p. 32. 47 Ibid. p. 82. 48 See Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative. Vol 3, Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, The University of Chicago Press, 1988. 49 Ibid. p. 188 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. p. 190 52 Ibid. p. 187 53 Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, History, Forgetting, Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer), The University of Chicago Press, 2004. p. 453. 54 While obliging pardon would extend the evasive forgetting, benevolent pardon would look for impunity, and indulgent pardon would erase the column of debts magically, carrying out the paper of deep forgetting. See Ricoeur, Paul, La lectura...., pp. 62-65. 55 See ibid. 56 Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself, p. 290. 57 Nussbaum, Martha C. Ricoeur on Tragedy. Teleology, Deontology, and Phronesis, in John Wall, William Shweiker, and David Hall (eds.), Paul Ricoeur, p. 272. 58 Ibid. 59 Ricoeur says that If one day the state must decline, why do we not use its violence one more time? How can we resist the temptation of a violence which would put an end with violence at once and forever? Death to traitors!, we shouted, but violence is again of its ashes Ricoeur, Paul, El filsofo y el poltico ante la cuestin de la libertad, in id. Sociedad, poltica e historicidad, Spanish Trans. N. Corona, R. Garca y M. Prelooker, Buenos Aires, Docencia, 1986, p. 191. 60 V. Ricoeur, Paul, Amor y justicia, in id. Amor y justicia, Spanish Trans. Toms Domingo Moratalla, Caparrs Editores, Madrid, 1993, pp. 13-34. 61 See Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, History 62 From The Course of Recognition it is clear that while agape is expression of generosity, justice is rule of equivalence. 63 See Todorov, Zvetan, The Uses and Abuses of Memory, in Howard Marchitello (ed.), What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, Nueva York: Routledge, 2001. Todorov basically confronts two modalities of memory: literal memory and exemplary memory. Whereas literal memory runs the risk of repressing the present under the past, exemplary memory implies the use of past events as a model for understanding new situations, working the past as an action principle for the present and the future.
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Arendt, Hannah, The human condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. On violence, Harcourt, Brace, 1969. Coady, C.A.J, Violence, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version: 1.0, London. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, London: Sheed & Ward, 1996. Galtung, J., Violence, Peace and Peace Research, in Journal of Peace Research, 1969, Vol. 6 n. 2, pp. 167-191; Cultural Violence, in Journal of Peace Research, 1990, Vol. 27 n. 3, pp. 291-305 Kant, Immanuel, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Trans. James W. Ellington, Hackett, 1993. Moratalla, Agustn Domingo, Introduction in Ricoeur, Paul, Lo justo, Spanish Trans. Agustn Domingo Moratalla, Caparrs Editores, Madrid, 1999 Nussbaum, Martha C. Ricoeur on Tragedy. Teleology, Deontology, and Phronesis, in John Wall, William Shweiker, and David Hall (eds.), Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, London, Routledge, 2002 Ricoeur, Paul, History and Truth, Trans. Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston: Northwestern University press, 1965. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, Trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S. J., London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Sociedad, poltica e historicidad, Spanish Trans. N. Corona, R. Garca y M. Prelooker, Buenos Aires, Docencia, 1986. Time and Narrative. Vol 3, Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, The University of Chicago Press, 1988. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, Trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991. Lectures 1 - Autour du politique. Paris, Seuil, 1991. Oneself as Another, Trans. Kathleen Blamey, The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Amor y justicia, Spanish Trans. Toms Domingo Moratalla, Caparrs Editores, Madrid, 1993. Les paradoxes de lautorit, in Philosophie, Bulletin de Liaison des professeurs de philosophie de lacadmie de Versailles, C.R.D.P. , n 7, fvrier 1995. Critique and conviction: conversations with Franois Azouvi and Marc de Launay, Trans Polity Press, Columbia Univerity, 1998. La lectura del tiempo pasado: memoria y olvido, Spanish Trans. Gabriel Aranazueque, Madrid, Arrecife, 1999. The Just, Trans. David Pellauer, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2000. Memory, History, Forgetting, Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer), The University of Chicago Press, 2004. The Course of Recognition, Trans. David Pellauer, Harvard College, 2005.

Todorov, Zvetan, "The Uses and Abuses of Memory, in Howard Marchitello (ed.), What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, Nueva York: Routledge, 2001. Wall, John, Moral Meaning. Beyond the Good and the Right, in John Wall, William Shweiker, and David Hall (eds.), Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, London, Routledge, 2002 Weber, Political Writings, ed. by Peter Lasssman and Ronald Speiers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Weil, Eric, La philosophie politique, Paris, Vrin, 1984.