Introduction: Paul Ricoeur:

Memory, Identity, Ethics

Steve Hedley Clark

Abstract
This special section on the later work of Paul Ricoeur is an attempt to examine the fruitfulness of that work for the social sciences. Of particular interest
are his theorization and application of the notions of memory, identity, justice, and the relation to the other to political and ethical problems in the
present. For example, his discourse links up the question of memory with that
of justice and the problem of constructing new polities which can be considered just. To do this, he introduces the concepts of translation ethos , the
exchange of memories and non-forgetful forgiveness in order to examine
the problem of the conditions for the imaginary construction of political
entities in which dialogue can take place between interlocutors with different, maybe conflicting, interests and historical locations, and thus with different senses of belonging and identities. His philosophical apparatus is
shown to have particular salience for the analysis of contemporary society.
Key words
forgiveness

history

identity

memory

Paul Ricoeur

But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, diculty and unresolved contradiction. . . . Id like to explore the
experience of late style that involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension,
and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going
against . . . (Edward Said, On Late Style, p. 7)

HIS SPECIAL section on the later work of Paul Ricoeur is an

attempt to examine the fruitfulness of that work for the social sciences. What stands out in that respect are the themes of memory,
identity, justice, and the relation to the other, and Ricoeurs application of
his philosophical position to issues about migration, the future of Europe,
and non-forgetful forgiveness as an element of reconciliation when divided

Theory, Culture & Society 2010 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 27(5): 3^17
DOI: 10.1177/0263276410380426

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Theory, Culture & Society 27(5)

groups try to live together. The question of memory has acquired greater salience at a time when techniques of mediatization and the erasures operated
by the heritage industry have diluted collective history, trivialized the commemoration of key events, or weakened the meaning in the present of traumas arising from past injustices, such as the Shoah and apartheid.
Equally, memory needs to be interrogated at a time when, in spite of the
surfeit of information in the age of the internet and digital forms of memorization or archiving actuality, the trace of what Foucault calls countermemory is being lost amongst the rubble of living history, and the forgetting of the uncomfortable truths of oppressions and exploitations that
should gnaw at consciences. The issue of justice has come to the fore with
the resurgence in inequalities ^ of class, gender, race ^ that had seemed to
be receding after the Second World War. Besides, justice now extends to
the whole domain of the living, so that its global scope poses a challenge
from the point of view of fundamental rights, the law, the environment,
the equitable distribution of capabilities and life chances. Finally, the problem of memory and justice arises for Europe because in spite of its attempt
to overcome a history of wars and confrontations in the shape of the
European Union, it is haunted by its own restless ghosts ^ from within,
such as the legacy of the world wars and Balkanization, and by its colonial
and imperial past freighted by a history of racism and destruction.
This special section does not have the scope to do justice to such
important themes. It tries merely to put them on the agenda, relying on
the analyses which Ricoeur made of these problems to incite reections on
the politics of memory and the question of ethical polities. The point worth
taking up is the way that Ricoeurs discourse links up the question of
memory with that of justice and the problem of constructing new polities
which may be deemed such, that is, the issues explored in Memory,
History, Forgetting (2004[2000]) and The Just (2000[1995]) and summarized in the essay Reections on a New Ethos for Europe (in Kearney,
1991: 3^14). There, he used the concepts of translation ethos, the exchange
of memories and non-forgetful forgiveness in order to examine the problem
of the conditions for the imaginary construction of political entities in
which dialogue can take place between interlocutors with dierent, maybe
conicting, interests and historical locations in terms of belonging and identity. The rst requires the kind of linguistic hospitality which is necessary
for adequate translation such that one can speak of a translation ethos
whose goal would be to repeat at the cultural and spiritual level the gesture
of linguistic hospitality (1996: 5). The second calls for narrative hospitality
whereby the speaker/hearer takesresponsibility, in imagination and in sympathy, for the story of the other, through the narrative life which concerns that
other (1996: 6, 7).This requires a labour requiring generosity and abnegation
in order to enable oneself to identify with the place from which the other tells
her story.The third requirement proceeds from the recognition thatwe can forgive only where there is no forgetting, so that the debt and the burden of indebtedness remains; forgiveness must bide its time, whilst the work of forgiveness
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Clark ^ Introduction: Paul Ricoeur

must be grafted on the work of memory in the language of narration (1996:11).

The ethical injunction involved in this labour of forgiveness is contained in the
factthattherecognitionofsueringinictedobligesonetoproceedfromthe suffering of others; imagining the suering of others before re-examining ones
own (1996: 9).The details of this process as understood in Ricoeurshermeneutical phenomenology are presented in Alison Scott-Bowmans Ricoeurs
Translation Model as a Mutual Labour of Understanding, where she elaborates
Ricoeurs arguments and draws inferences regarding the othering of the
Muslim world (see also Venn, 2005, for a discussion in relation to the IsraeliPalestinian conict).
Another instance of othering which resonates with present ethico-political problems concerns the legal status of the stranger and the ethical
issues which their right to hospitality triggers, discussed in Ricoeurs
Being a Stranger in this special section. In this paper, Ricoeur examines
what belonging means, both in terms of citizenship and in terms of the welcoming of the stranger as a host. He stresses the principle that hospitality
implicates the right of the stranger not to be treated as enemy when arriving
as an immigrant or refugee, but to be instead recognized as a member of
the human family whose inherent dignity proceeds from the (Kantian)
idea of the common possession of the earth. Hospitality would then include
the right to protection and the right to conversation, that is, to dialogue
and the exchange of memory within the context of a translation ethos.
These principles are tested by the fact that states wish to protect themselves
and the community of citizens from an excessive inux of migrants; they
therefore introduce laws which run counter to the injunction to grant hospitality to the stranger. The problem is complicated by the fact that the refugee is often someone displaced as a consequence of the violence of war or
development, in which all nations are implicated, given the geo-political
scope of such conicts.
A dicult task is called for then in bringing about new and just polities from the violences of the past, inscribed in the memory of collectivities
as it exists in narratives of particular groups. This way of relating memory
to history and to an idea of justice is made possible on the basis of the concept of narrative identity, a concept he developed in his earlier work on
Time and Narrative (3 volumes: 1984, 1985, 1988). The main point here is
the understanding of self-identity in terms of the intermingling of stories
one tells about oneself (the autobiographical level) with the stories of
others in relation to whom ones life unfolds, such that every identity is literally entangled in stories (Ricoeur, 1996: 6; also 1991 and 1988). These
other stories are woven into the biographies of signicant others, as well as
in terms of narratives that invoke a collective and its past, or second order
narratives, inscribed in customs, norms, beliefs, monuments, commemorations, ocial history and counter-memories.
Second order narratives play an important part in the elaboration and
rectication of identity since they participate in the doubling of the autobiographical sense of a self with a collective identity, the time of the self with
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Theory, Culture & Society 27(5)

the time of the other(s); this is the process detailed in Lisa Joness article in
this section, Oneself as an Author. For this reason, how one tells the
nation, the race, the ethne, religious identity, and so on, is constitutive of
the sense of ones place in the world. Second order narratives relate to the
process in which power intervenes to authorize particular historical narratives and so produce eects calculated to serve the interests of particular
groups. Much is at stake, therefore, in the writing of this history or process
of memorialization, since the appropriation and authorization of particular
narrations implicate power relations and a politics of truth framed by conicting interests.
We nd a telling example in Adam Piettes article in this section,
Contesting Realms of Memory in Early Cold War France, in which he
brings to light the conicting political interests in the French states narrative of the massacre of civilians at Tulle and Oradour by the Germans in
the Second World War. The main objective of this narrative strategy was
the erasure of the role of communist resistance ghters in the case of Tulle
and the sanctication of a highly sanitized form of cultural martyrdom in
the latter case; both have obvious implications about which groups could
lay claim to legitimacy, authority, nationhood and honour. Besides the ideological stakes in how one tells the history of the nation or the group, there
is the question of ethical responsibility in speaking the truth, both about
oneself and about what happened in history. The two are interestingly
joined in Foucaults (2001, 2005) reections on parrhesia, or frank speaking
and truth telling, involving a labour upon oneself in order to know oneself,
as well as the courage to speak truth to power; both raise issues of ethical
responsibility. In introducing the later work of Ricoeur, this section hopes
it will provide a philosophical basis on which the social sciences are able to
engage with the historical dimension of issues of identity, memory, and
ethics.
Situating Late Ricoeur
In presenting this work, one could begin with an apparently simple question: what are the dening features of the late period of Ricoeurs work
which make it fruitful for this engagement? Although there is something
valedictory in the publication in France of the three-volume Lectures
between 1991 and 1994, these texts, though incomplete, link up with the
exposition of the problematic of narrative identity in the nal volume of
Time and Narrative and with the more tightly focused discussion of personal identity in Oneself as Another, which was based on the Giord
Lectures given slightly earlier in 1985^6. Another source for the thesis of
self as story is clearly expounded in compressed form in Life in Quest of
Narrative and Narrative Identity (in Wood, 1992); these essays are supplemented by some interesting further remarks in interviews in Life Stories
(in Kearney, 2004). A problem that arose in these texts is the relationship
between life and ction, related to the relationship between art and life,
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Clark ^ Introduction: Paul Ricoeur

which Ricoeur associates with the problem of reguration which every self
constantly confronts in striving to make sense of the events of a life
(Ricoeur, 1990: 180). The dilemma is that there exists a fundamental heterogeneity between history and life, such that the narrativization of ones existence does not coincide with events, yet must be able to express in a
consistent form the fact that each existence is a life in search of its own history (Ricoeur, 1990: 180, 181). This dilemma is explored in Lisa Joness
Oneself as an Author, where she seeks to expand the points of convergence
between being the author of ones own life-narrative and the author as narrator of a ctional text. Even though situated within the enactment of our
own stories, rather than occupying an external vantage point with regard to
them, we continually, through a process of poiesis and mimesis, prospectively and retrospectively regure our destinies in such a way as to bridge
the seeming disjunction between ction and life.
In the light of these earlier explorations of the identity human beings
acquire through the mediation of the narrative function (Ricoeur, 1990:
188), one can approach Memory, History, Forgetting in terms of Ricoeurs
insertion of the category of memory/forgetting between the dialectic of ctional and historical emplotment previously explored in Time and
Narrative. A central dichotomy is established between a Platonic tradition,
in which memory is dened as a present representation of what is absent,
with the Aristotelian claim that memory actually connects to the past. The
comparative passivity of associationist retrieval of sense-impressions
(mneme) is contrasted with the conscious pursuit of the past (anamnesis):
the model of tabula rasa versus the image of releasing birds from a cage.
This polarity is meticulously tracked through a succession of philosophical
accounts, most prominently those of Husserl and Bergson, up to and including highly contemporary versions of the memory-trace derived from
Articial Intelligence. There is consistent emphasis on the use and abuse of
memory, and the hubristic ambition of false completion, countered by a
periodic reassertion of an iconoclastic Nietzschean overcoming of history
through commitment to the idea of force of life.
The relation of personal to collective memory is explained by setting a
tradition of inwardness, or inward self-reection, against that of the self as
inevitably marked by communal experience, again referring back to earlier
analyses of emotion as inevitably outward-directed and social. This discussion relates back to the fuller development of this relation in Oneself as
Another (1992) where the question of the meaning of being as act and
potentiality (1992: 20) is answered by proposing an ontology in which the
other is not a stranger but can become my counterpart (1992: 335). An
important aspect from the point of view of the relation of ontology to
ethics is the assertion, drawn from the work of Levinas, of the other not as
spectacle but as face which is a voice, and a voice that, in calling for me
to respond to its call, constitutes me as responsible, that is, as capable of
responding (1992: 336). Ricoeur no longer needs to establish these grounds,
so that there is less emphasis on the formal understanding of the act of
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Theory, Culture & Society 27(5)

narrating (though some consideration of Mink, Hayden White, and the issue
of Holocaust representation debated in his earlier works reappears), and
less attention to the foundations in Husserl, Levinas, and Heidegger.
Instead, more attention is paid to the constitution of history writing out of
the contingencies of the archive and its irreducible dependence on witnessing. Again, Adam Piettes piece illustrates the problem from the point of
view of the ethical implication in the narration of history, given that power
intervenes to reconstitute the archive and undermine the role of the witness
regarding the question of attestation. Attestation, one should note, is central
in Ricoeurs ontology, since it convokes the issue of trust in the unfolding
of the dialectic of the self and the other (1992: 21), and in the power to
say, the power to do, and the power to recognize oneself as a character in a
narrative (1992: 22), principally by recognizing oneself as the one who is
called to respond to the obligation placed upon me by the suering of the
other (1992: 299 ). One could note incidentally that the status of promising, testimony and prospective intervention serves as a unifying feature of
Ricoeurs late thought from theology to jurisprudence to translation theory:
for example Lattestation: entre phenomenologie et ontologie (1991).
It can be seen that the emphasis on history, memory and forgetting
does not mark a break with earlier concerns, but is a deployment of propositions from his apparatus to address problems of translation, commemoration and forgiveness in the context of attempts to forge new potentialities
for living well with and for the other (1992: 330), including past adversaries
and enemies. Alison Scott-Bowman in this section draws from this corpus
to examine the dicult ethical injunctions implicated in the idea of linguistic and narrative hospitality that a commitment to respecting and responding to the other means.
The turn to history also enables Ricoeur to undertake thorough and
astute analyses of chronological disjunctions between macro- and micro-histories (exemplied by Braudel and Ginzburg), and of the transitions between
various forms of archaeologies of knowledge in Foucault, de Certeau and
Elias. Equally, it is an occasion to contest the ruptures presupposed in
larger-scale denitions of modernity, with perceptive analyses of Koselleck
and Taylor, and to grapple with the problematic status of the notion of mentalites in aspects of the Annales School. He argues against Lloyds (1990)
critique of the mentalities thesis to insist on the constructed nature of the
scientic rationality underlying all claims to historical objectivity, and
point to an irreducibly mythic substratum presupposed in the activity of
history writing. This is made explicit not only in the pages on death in history, insisting on the liminal status of the cemetery against Heideggerian
notions of being-towards-death, but also in the reection on historical
knowledge as itself a form of pharmakon, simultaneously poison and cure,
and thus obliging us to make judgements about the just measure. Such
judgements are involved in the idea of non-forgetful forgiveness which
arises in the question of reconciliation in the aftermath of events like the
Holocaust, Rwanda, apartheid, wars, and so on, a problem central for the
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Clark ^ Introduction: Paul Ricoeur

reconstitution of Europe. Yet, as Adam Piettes article demonstrates by reference to the massacre at Tulle, this process is not a purely ethical one, not
simply a question of debt and indebtedness, since history is tied up with
issues of the making and remaking of collective identities at the level of
place and communal space, and thus with the intervention of power in the
process of collective memory, as well as with the embeddedness of memory
in specic spaces or lieux.
Biography and History: The Personal Context
The relation of collective memory to personal life begins to draw from his
own biography in texts such as Critique and Conviction (1998[1995]), a set
of interviews which provided the space for him to take the risk once in my
life of precisely what dialogue allows, a language that is less controlled
(1998: 1). In the course of the interviews a sense is restored of the way his
life was embedded in the denitive historical events of the century, as the
following biographical elements from his life neatly illustrate: raised as an
orphan (pupille de la nation), after the early death of his mother and loss
of his (unknown) father in the First World War; his own wartime experiences, a pacist decorated for valour, then imprisoned in a POW camp for
nearly 5 years, where he set up a camp university and translated Husserls
Ideen; a potential assassination target after protest against state torture in
Algeria (a lifelong theme: see for example Ce que la torture enseigne?,
1994); going into something akin to voluntary exile for 17 years after humiliation by student unrest while serving as Dean of Nanterre; and eventual
reincorporation into the heart of not only French but also European intellectual and political life.
Against this background, Memory, History, Forgetting may appear selfevidently to be the work of a post-Cold War philosopher, published in
2000, a decade after Ricoeurs rehabilitation in France which itself coincided
almost precisely with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the
Soviet empire. During this period, he achieved not merely intellectual preeminence but direct inuence over concepts of the newly-enlarged
European community, in both its practical constitutional workings and its
hinterland of shared beliefs and mythologies. Yet his account of the abuses
of memory in authorised, imposed, celebrated, commemorated history ^
ocial history has many striking features in common with analyses of the
Cold War.
The willingness to apply the lessons of memory and forgetting to his
own life and work is evident in Critique and Conviction when he acknowledges his own support for Petain in the early period of captivity: I regret
my error in judgement during the rst year (1998 :17). One might speculate whether the attention in Memory, History, Forgetting to issues of individual and collective remembrance, the relation of amnesty to pardon and
the impossible task of reparation, is governed by a sense of generational culpability (evident in the nal years of Mitterand and others).
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10

Theory, Culture & Society 27(5)

A devious form of forgetting is at work here, resulting from stripping

the social actors of their original power to recount their actions themselves.
But this dispossession is not without a secret complicity, which makes forgetting a semi-passive, semi-active behaviour, as is seen in forgetting by
avoidance (fuite), the expression of bad faith and its strategy of evasion
motivated by an obscure will not to inform oneself, not to investigate the
harm done: in short, by a wanting not-to-know. Western Europe and
indeed all of Europe after the dismal years of the middle of the 20th century
has furnished the painful spectacle of this stubborn will (Ricoeur, 2004:
449). Relating to this, Ricoeur discusses French forgetting with regard to
Vichy France and the German debate on war-guilt for the Holocaust; nothing is oered, however, on the newer emphasis on the Germans as themselves victims traumatized by aerial bombing, systematic rape and mass
expulsions, and the analysis obviously might be applied to various forms of
British post-imperial retrospection, and so help to open the empire of forgetting, an empire divided against itself (Ricoeur, 2004: xvi).
It could be argued that his reections on Vichy and his own engagements in these events are an attempt at mediating between Pierre Noras
commemorative Realms of Memory (Lieux de memoire)1 and Henry
Roussos indictment of the Vichy Syndrome. Yet this mediation appears
unsatisfactory, insofar as it may be read as a symptom rather than a diagnosis of the evasive hypocrisy of amnesty culture in post-war France, the
issue which Piettes article examines in some detail.
Some Themes in the Late Works
In general tone and approach, Ricoeur may seem a technical philosopher in
a restrictive sense, but the political and ethical engagement has been present
throughout. The preoccupations of such early essays as The Socius and
the Neighbour and The Political Paradox in History and Truth (1955)
re-emerge in the 1990 s. Power and Violence, originally a prefatory essay
to the French translation of Hannah Arendts The Human Condition
(1989), may be seen as a crucial transitional text, for seeking to dene horizontal and vertical axes of authority and dene a legitimate sphere of ideology in relation to the potential of the state for violence. This problematic is
revisited in the two essays on Weber included in Reections on the Just,
but perhaps more pertinently has been used in discussion of legal and
administrative structures appropriate for any new European constitution.
Ricoeurs later work has also been hugely inuential on recent
attempts to dene a common European heritage. The issue pervades the
three essays collected in On Translation, as Alison Scott-Bauman demonstrates in her article in this special section. Acknowledging the impossibility
of perfect coincidence allows the development of an ethics of humility, interconnection and tolerance that may be expanded from issues of personal
conduct onto a model of European integration, on the basis of shared memories, narratives and forgiveness. Translation can also serve to overcome the
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Clark ^ Introduction: Paul Ricoeur 11

pathological othering of the Muslim world that has replaced older Cold War
dichotomies; it may oer both an ideal (if ultimately unrealizable) horizon
of endeavour and a highly specic political and educational agenda requiring urgent implementation.
In Reections on a New Ethos for Europe, Ricoeur transposes the
problem of the form of the supranational state onto a series of dialectics
between self and other. The continent is ineluctably polyglot; thus it
requires a continuous project of translation designed not to eradicate but to
enhance its irreducible pluralism (1996: 4). Respect for the other implies
acceptance of dierence of memory. This is dened not in terms of retention of traces of the past but as a narrative function whose capacity to preserve is inseparable from its forward-projecting capacity. Memory
determines the future. It is now the mobility of story rather than its
order-giving capacity that is stressed (1996: 6).
The founding moment of a given group is necessarily frozen, immutable; yet, Ricoeur argues, this still allows plural readings since we have the
capacity to share symbolically and respectfully in the founding events of
other cultures. The past is a cemetery of promises that have not been
kept which must be reactivated (1996: 8). The exchange of memories
requires imagining the suering of others before re-examining our own
recongured in terms of a logic of abundance of an economy of the gift
(1996: 10). Memory respects rather than resents the testimony of other
traditions.
Certain aspects of Ricoeurs political analysis seem to bear out Renans
famous dictum that a nation is held together by what it chooses to forget;
how much more must that apply to a supra-national entity such as the
European Union. Pragmatically, one must move on, get away from a heritage of intransigence, conict and guilt in order to construct a framework
of institutions for a new form of trans-national citizenship. Yet, drawing on
his analyses of pardon and promise, Ricoeur also postulates the possibility
of a redemptive memory, committed to delity, transmission and renewal
of a shared past.
The Religious and the Philosophical
In Critique and Conviction, Ricoeur announces his concern with overlaps
between religious and secular thought, domains which had previously been
staunchly kept separate (1995: 2). Therefore, one might have anticipated
substantial amounts of explicitly theological discussion, from a gure who
increasingly looks to be the greatest Christian thinker of the century, but
perhaps not the reverse process whereby critical philosophy transforms the
nature of his own faith.
Figuring the Sacred (1995) oers an excellent overview of writings
over 40 years, covering the early existential emphasis derived from Barth
and Kierkegaard, subsequent engagement with Eliades typology, Bultmans
demythologization, and Von Rads narrative theology. These critical readings
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12 Theory, Culture & Society 27(5)

focus on the symbol as potential means of access to traces of the sacred in

an otherwise disenchanted world. Here he examines narrative as a primary
source of biblical meaning, seeing it not as a predetermined fullment of a
divine covenant but as an already polyphonic and self-disrupting generic
mix. One might note a slight imbalance due to the absence of any essays
on the conict of interpretations and hermeneutics of suspicion, concepts
for which mid-period Ricoeur was perhaps best known.
Thinking Biblically (1998), co-written with Andre la Coque, oers a
series of contrapuntal interpretations of major biblical texts. The creation
myth in Genesis is both detached from and acts as precondition of subsequent narratives of Gods relation to his chosen people. Ricoeur relates the
biblical commandment Thou shalt not kill to Kantian notions of procedural law. In other readings of biblical texts, he opposes the more formal
notion of eschatology and soteriology to the openness and risk involved in
the genre of future-directed prophecy exemplied in Ezekiel. Other points
concern the relation of lamentation to praise, which is seen as constitutive
in the elegiac utterance of the Psalms. His stress on the utopian aspect of
the nuptial imagery deployed in Song of Songs allows for the reinstatement
of a redemptive allegory over carnal immediacy. An interesting juxtaposition of Athens and Jerusalem is managed in the overlay of the Greek concept of being onto Judaic monotheism to tease out the implications in the
translation history of Gods self-designation in Exodus 3 :14 (ehyeh aser
ehyeh: I am who I am).
From a secular perspective, the question might be posed of why these
dense hermeneutical exegeses should remain of interest. To begin with, the
volume itself exemplies an ideal of collaborative debate, whilst the issues
at stake resurface across the whole range of other contexts (for example,
thinking origin without recourse to chronological antecedence with regard
to the authority of the state). Ricoeur himself vigorously insists in his discussion of Education and Secularism (Critique and Conviction: 127^38)
that the centrality of the Bible remains inescapable within a European
Judaeo-Greek intellectual heritage. An important point is that an appropriate degree of self-consciousness about that situatedness is a precondition of
mutual respect and comprehension in dealing with other faiths and
traditions.
Living up to Death performs a kind of volte-face whereby the task of
criticism begins to transform what it might mean to be a Christian. The
editor Oliver Abel detects a move to alternative forms of belief, evidenced
in references to Stoic ataraxia, Eckhartian detachment, and Buddhist
renunciation. It is notable for positing modes of non-verbal interaction with
the divine rather than through the mediation of scrupulous textual exegesis.
It is notable also for preserving a Freudian model of working-through that
contains a positive notion of grief as potentially a form of gaiety.
What Makes Us Think? is notable for the perceptive comments made
by the interlocutor, Jean-Pierre Changeux. Again, the event of dialogue is
as, if not more, important than any denitive conclusion, in contrast to the
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Clark ^ Introduction: Paul Ricoeur 13

intemperance of Anglo-American debate as exemplied in Dawkins and

Eagleton, even where the same terrain is covered of the Darwinist challenge
to religious ethics (1998: 179^95). Ricoeur displays characteristic astuteness
on semantic short-circuits (1998: 41), for example on the polysemy of the
term indication (1998: 98). His occasional harshness, as in his insistence
that Spinozas monism must be understood within the overall progressive
structure of the Ethics (1998: 201), is softened by the recognition that
Changeux himself is not a reductionist (1998: 19). Yet the biologist element
to Ricoeurs own thought is openly acknowledged (1998: 21) with debts to
Jonas and Canguilhem and, in their wake, to Aristotelian rootedness in
life, to the point of countenancing, as Changeux notes, ultra-materialist
claims (1998: 182). It is particularly notable how much Ricoeur is willing
to concede to the vigorous critique of religion oered, in particular being
willing to abandon deity as theological-political category (1998: 271), in
order to explore the alternative phenomenologies of religious faith envisaged
in Living up to Death.

Law, Ethics, Politics

In Ricoeurs late writings on justice, based largely on the lectures given at
the Institut des hautes etudes de la justice, the category of law is inserted
between ethics and politics to compel redenition of wide areas of preceding
work (a move very similar to placing the problematic of memory between
time and narrative). The publication history makes developments within
and between the two volumes, The Just and Reections on the Just, hard
to track. The jackets claim that the collections make the whole of Ricoeurs
work in the area available is clearly incorrect as they omit essays included
in Lectures, of which there is no English translation, in particular the seminal piece, Le just entre le legal et le bon (1991). The American debate
between universalists and communitarians, on procedural denitions of justice versus local context-bound embodiments, is also a continuous point of
reference. Rawlss Theory of Justice (1999[1971]) and subsequent essays
are commended by Ricoeur for exploring the paradoxes of the ideal of fair
distribution and of maximizing the minimal share; however, by giving priority to the just over the good, the judicial is detached from the ethical, so
potentially allowing the minority to be sacriced to the perceived interest
of the majority. In contrast, Walzers Spheres of Justice (1985[1983]) is
praised for its denition of social goods as multiple, reliant on social symbolism, each possessing their own separate internal logic, but criticized for
evading the problem of the relation of these plural spheres to any form of
determining state authority, and subsequent potential for conict between
what might easily become a miscellaneous bric-a-brac (2007: 79). The primary appeal of this debate is seen as bypassing a stand-o between the
holistic models of sociology and the methodological individualism of economics dominating European discussion of comparable issues.
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Consideration of law requires meditation on the nature of the judicial

space, the role of the judge as a second-order third party committed to just
distance and impartiality, and the concepts of sanction, rehabilitation,
pardon in the act of sentencing. This becomes a form of bonding between
accuser and accused, in which perpetrator and victim are ideally reconciled
in an agreed narrative and outcome. The verdict therefore is not the pronouncement but paradoxically the suspending of vengeance (The Just,
2000: 136). (This issue is dealt with at greater length in The Course of
Recognition, published posthumously, which mostly recapitulates previous
arguments, though there is still some impressive micro-lexical analysis in
several languages, an interesting discussion of interiority of recognition in
Greek literature, and some intricate exposition of pre-Jena Hegel.)
A contrast is drawn between war as the insistent theme of political philosophy, whereas peace, the triumph of discourse over violence, is characterized as the major motif of the philosophy of law. Phenomenologically, the
demand for justice is motivated by a kind of primordial indignation at
unequal shares, the failure to keep ones word, or unfair retributions. A
dual axis is proposed of horizontal constitution of the self as dialogic, and
a vertical axis of predicates of morality attached to human action. Desire is
conceptualized as a form of lack, compelling the formation of projects.
Individuals are therefore capable, having the power to make interventions
in the world, and responsible, and thus appropriate subjects for the imputation of motives and outcomes. What The Just calls the specic status of
the judicial (2000: vii) may be dened through its dual status as both practice and institution, oering a mediation of state violence and constraint on
the impulse of individual vengeance. The trial is an eminently singular
aair, with strong parallels with medical diagnosis (and even perhaps aesthetic judgement).
Strawsons notion of personal identity as dened through formal ascription of linguistic predicates is supplemented by Charles Taylors notion of
strong evaluations capable of dening specic actions as good. (The issues are
more fully expounded in The Fundamental and the Historical: Notes on
Taylors Sources ofthe Self in Reections on the Just, 2007[2001].) Any relation
to the other is necessarily mediated, requiring dierentiated categories of ones
own, what is near, and what is distant. Personal fullment presupposes the
wish to live well with and for others in just institutions. There is a consistent
emphasis on theAristotelianvirtue of phronesis, practicalwisdom inunique situations, expounded against the Kantian model of conscience dened in terms
of rigor, intransigence, and impartiality, and the internalization of law as a
form of prohibition. Legal argumentation is seen as halfway between proof and
sophism, whilst the epistemological specicity of the act of judging is stressed
as concerned with no longer either the legal or the good but the equitable
(2007: xxiv). Dworkins hard cases oer a test for reective judgement in which
the literary enterprise takes on a canonical character for judicial theory
(The Just: 112), with analogous concepts of ttingness and anticipation of
narrative coherence.
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Clark ^ Introduction: Paul Ricoeur 15

So what is distinctive in Ricoeur on law? His discussions can be seen

as a dialectic between teleological and deontological ethics mediated by categories of self, the good life, and just institutions, though it is far too
simple to regard this as a straightforward dichotomy between Aristotelian
and Kantian traditions. It is also a characteristic mediation between AngloAmerican and European traditions of debate, moving rapidly, seeking no
nal arbitration but instead a continuous process of mutually illuminating
transformation. Justice must be thought of as simultaneously structure and
event, as utopian horizon and specic practice, as high concept and contingency decision-making, utopian horizon and specic practice. (His exemplary testimony as to the notion of responsibility in the scandal of
HIV-infected blood transfusions is reprinted as an appendix to Reections
on the Just 2007[2001].)
The Archive
Finally, the Fonds Ricoeur have established a research and conference
centre at 83 Boulevard Arago, 75014 Paris, housing Ricoeurs personal
library of more than 15,000 books, plus manuscripts, lecture notes, and correspondence. The archive contains items such as a virtually complete manuscript work on negation and previously unpublished essays on Freud and
late Wittgenstein. One hundred and four shorter items are also listed
during Ricoeurs nal decade when he was over 80 and in increasingly
poor health. Some are included in the volumes but many important essays
are published in separate formats or remain uncollected (for example, La
marque du passe, 1998). So there is the intimidating prospect that
Ricoeurs already voluminous oeuvre will continue to expand (for example
the new material contained in Autour de la Psychoanalyse, edited by
Catherine Goldenstein and J-P Schlegel; Seuil, 2007). There is a bilingual
website (www.fondsricoeur.fr) with continuously updated bibliography,
online display of previous exhibitions, and notication of new publications.
Ricoeur has become his admirers, as Auden commented of Yeats, and the
activities of Catherine Goldenstein and her board have been doing his own
life and work ample and appropriate justice.
Note
1. There is no precise English equivalent to Noras sprawling oeuvre, appearing in
seven volumes between 1981 and 1992, only partially translated in four volumes
between 1996 and 2010. Raphael Samuels Theatres of Memory (1996^7) perhaps
comes closest, though Noras social phenomenology linked to place might also be
considered in terms of the kind of psycho-geography originating with Debord, of
which Iain Sinclair is the best known British proponent. In the French context,
the motivation for the project clearly lies in the reassessment of the revolutionary
heritage in the run-up to the 1989 bicentennial; the notion of public commemoration is inextricably bound to the issue of the viability of a constructed mythology
of secular republicanism.
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Theory, Culture & Society 27(5)

References
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Dosse, F. (2000) Paul Ricoeur: less sens dune vie. Paris: La Decouverte.
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Foucault, Michel (2005) The Hermeneutics of the Subject (trans. Graham
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Kearney, R. (ed.) (1996) Paul Ricoeur: The Hermenutics of Action. London:
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Kearney, R. (2004) On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva. Farnham: Ashgate.
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Nora, P. (1981^92; 1996^2010) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past
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Rawls, John (1999[1971]) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
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Ricoeur, P. (1991^4) Lectures, 3 vols. Paris: Seuil.
Ricoeur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago:
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Ricoeur, P. (1995) Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination,
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reconnaissance by David Pellauer). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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Clark ^ Introduction: Paul Ricoeur 17

Ricoeur, P. (2009[2007]) Vivant jusqua' la mort and Fragments [posthumous
book]. Paris: Seuil. (Living up to Death, trans. David Pellauer. Chicago:
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Samuel, R. (1996) Theatres of Memory: Vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary
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Democracia Lisboa (II.A.648 b).

Steve Hedley Clark is visiting professor at the Graduate School of

Humanities and Sociology, University of Tokyo, Japan. He has published
on issues of critical theory, postcolonial studies, and national identity and
is the author of Paul Ricoeur (Routledge, 1990) and Travel-Writing and
Empire (ZED, 1999). [email: shc100@hotmail.com]

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