Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination Sophie Vlacos NEW YORK • LONDON • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10018 WC1B 3DP USA UK www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Sophie Vlacos, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vlacos, Sophie. Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination / Sophie Vlacos. pages cm Summary: “A critical history of Ricoeur and his relationship to literary theories, past, present and future”– Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-3538-4 (hardback) 1. Ricoeur, Paul–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Literature–Philosophy. I. Title. B2430.R554V59 2014 194 – dc23 2013044890 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-3538-4 ePub: 978-1-4411-4294-8 ePDF: 978-1-4411-1955-1 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. For Julie and Lefteris Contents Preface ix Introduction: Moderation, Mediation, Bias 1 1 Ricoeur at Nanterre 15 1.1 Introduction 15 1.2 The decline of existentialism 17 1.3 Structuralism and the Ricoeurian critique 21 1.4 Textualism 40 1.5 ‘ Returning the Sign to the Universe’: Benveniste and the Ricoeurian departure 44 2 Hermeneutics and the Romantic Prejudice 53 2.1 The Romantic prejudice 53 2.2 A ‘misguided Kantianism’ and the hermeneutical critique 56 2.3 The New Critical heritage 66 3 Hermeneutics and Ontology 73 3.1 Ricoeur and ontology 73 3.2 Being and Time: Hermeneutic phenomenology 74 3.3 Heidegger’s French receptions 78 3.4 France and the ‘Heidegger question’ 82 3.5 Poetic freedom of another kind 85 3.6 Ricoeur’s critique of Heidegger 100 4 The Poetry of Reason: Ricoeur and the Theoretical Imagination 107 4.1 Interpretation and the semantics of discourse 107 4.2 ‘The symbol gives rise to thought’ 110 4.3 Metaphor and the question of philosophy 128 4.4 Speculative discourse and critical autonomy 171 viii Contents 5 The Ethics of Imagination 177 5.1 Ethical turns in philosophy and literature 181 5.2 Wisdom and poetry: Phronesis and poiesis 187 5.3 ‘… we have never lived enough’: Nussbaum’s literary ethics 190 5.4 T owards a poetics of will: The ontological and imaginative significance of narrative 195 5.5 Narrative emplotment as transcendental schema made visible 199 5.6 Narrative identity and the ethics of selfhood 203 5.7 Je est un autre: Ricoeur, poststructural modernist 205 Bibliography 213 Index 219 Preface Paul Ricoeur’s reputation as a hermeneutic philosopher and one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers is undisputed. Within the order of great literary theorists however, his place is less established. This is in spite of the fact that creative language stands at the very heart of his philosophy. In the parting light of the twentieth century, it was the genius Jacques Derrida and his illustrious cohorts at Yale who blazed the brightest trail in Anglo-American literary circles. Their brilliance proved to be a swansong, for the formal preoccupations of the century and for the literary theoretical revolution it bore. Propelling this study is an overwhelming perplexity regarding the culture of a monumentalized, and to some extent abstracted, Literary Theory at that time. Why, we ask, should literary studies have adopted a stance of such thoroughgoing scepticism with regard to the literary object, abandoning the claim for the literary work and its aesthetic, imaginative distinction, for a discourse of the ‘merely’ literary, a discourse at pains to demonstrate the literary status of all language, and one which proceeds to erode the autonomy, and indeed the integrity, of both work and critic? The main topic of this study concerns Ricoeur’s relationship to this phenomenon and to his own treatment of literature as a pre-eminent philosophical concern. The focus of it meanwhile is limited to just a handful of Ricoeur’s most important works from the middle phase of his career. Starting with The Conflict of Interpretations (1969) and ending with Oneself as Another (1990), these great texts reflect the trajectory of a thinker who sustained constant critical engagement with the guiding preoccupations of literature’s theoretical era, and one who derived immeasurable inspiration from the traditions and innovations of literary critical, theoretical and creative discourse.