dudley, andrew - tracing ricoeur

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diacritics / summer 2000 43 TRACING RICOEUR DUDLEY ANDREW François Dosse. PAUL RICOEUR: LES SENS D’UNE VIE. Paris: La Découverte, 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 mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, another magisterial tome appearing too late to be included in François Dosse’s intellectual biography or in my overview here, which lifts off from that biography. Ricoeur, destined to keep writing—unable to conclude his conversation with philosophy—has 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. Ricoeur’s 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, Ricoeur’s 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-. François 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, even—indeed, especially—when 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, diacritics 30.2: 43–69

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  • diacritics / summer 2000 43

    TRACING RICOEUR

    DUDLEY ANDREW

    Franois Dosse. PAUL RICOEUR: LES SENS DUNE VIE. Paris: La Dcouverte,1997. [PR]

    The Time of the Tortoise

    Gilles Deleuze chose not to see the end of the century that Michel Foucault claimedwould be named after him, a century that began just as philosophy registered theaftershocks caused by the work of his closest progenitors, Nietzsche and Bergson.Amplifying the waves they made with tempests of his own, Deleuze tried to capsize theflat-bottom boat of academic philosophy by insisting that it look beyond its own discoursefor both the life and the vocabulary to account for life that should be its only mission.Scanning French philosophy for what it might contribute to art, fiction, and cinema, Iinvoke the stirring character of Deleuze, but I do so to deflect attention to another figure,Paul Ricoeur, whom Deleuze conveniently sets off by contrast.

    Less than a decade since his death, Deleuze is in danger of having ceded his claimto Ricoeur, the real long-distance runner, who is now pressing his publications into thenew century, moving relentlessly beyond his exhausted reviewers. Last year, a fanfareof publicity greeted La mmoire, lhistoire, loubli, another magisterial tome appearingtoo late to be included in Franois Dosses intellectual biography or in my overviewhere, which lifts off from that biography. Ricoeur, destined to keep writingunable toconclude his conversation with philosophyhas outlasted Deleuze, whose notorietyderives from the radical break he makes with the thought of our times, for his abruptdeviations and more abrupt conclusions. Ricoeurs reputation rests seldom on anythingconclusive but instead on his persistent interaction with and deployment of so much ofthat thought. By accident or by savvy design, Ricoeurs trajectory (initiated in thephenomenological atmosphere of the prewar era) has taken him through myth criticism,psychoanalysis, structuralism, language philosophy, analytic philosophy, deconstruction,poetics, historiography, ethics, and epistemology. He carries his learning forward toeach new endeavor, not believing in the radical break or the prefix post-.

    Franois Dosse tracks Ricoeur in a magnificent account that places its subject inrelation to each of these movements. But Parisian academic fashion forms only onefacet of a life whose brilliance is refracted as well by theology, politics, and a remarkablesocial network. The thickness of his life evidently provides Ricoeur the necessary ballastto maintain his orientation on the stormy seas of intellectual debate. In fact, across aspan of seventy years of uninterrupted reading and writing, he has anticipated, invoked,or debated virtually every important school of French thought, doing so in a way thatboth establishes their value and serves his own agenda. Ricoeur profits from theproductive tension that results, evenindeed, especiallywhen this brings about adislocation of his views. These exchanges inevitably leave his own ideas clearer, moredefensible, and invulnerable to charges of parochialism. Although Ricoeur concludeshis three-volume Time and Narrative with an aggressive chapter explicitly asking,

    diacritics 30.2: 4369

  • 44

    Should We Renounce Hegel?, there is something deeply Hegelian about this strategyof taking on, then managing to assimilate, all comers so as to emerge stronger. Ricoeurmay not share Hegels limitless arrogance (literally arrogating everything to himself),but his humility is equally ambitious.

    There was never any question for Deleuze about renouncing Hegel. His antipathyto this philosophe de ltat was immediate, total, and itself completely arrogant. Asfor Ricoeur, Deleuze apparently avoided the man Dosse dubs philosophe de la Cit,at least before 1986. Then, he links their names after each had just published amultivolume treatise on temporality and fabulation, Deleuzes cinema books picking upthe notion of bifurcated time that Ricoeur had just developed in Time and Narrative.Proust was explicitly a key source for both of their studies. But apparently, and outwardly,it gets no closer than this. In concatenating these two French philosophers, I follow thelead of Olivier Mongin, who finds them both to be supreme philosophers of time, yetincompatible on the basic question of mediation with regard to time [Mongin 128].Where Deleuzes books on the cinema proclaim the immediacy of time, Ricoeur insiststhat time is unthinkable except as mediated, whether through fictional or historicalnarrative. Mongin opposes Ricoeur and Deleuze by distinguishing the objects theyrespectively champion (the rcit and the cinema), but I propose to drag Ricoeur to thecinema, where he could have the effect of cultivating ideas about the film image (indeedthe idea of cinema) that Deleuze sowed in the first place. In doing so, I force a chemicalreaction that never catalyzed on its own, despite the proximity of these men, who certainlymust have met at the famous week with Heidegger in 1955 at Crisy-la-Salle [Dosse,PR 418] and when they taught philosophy in Paris thereafter.

    The cinema, it turns out, opens a historical context that justifies, if only in ahypothetical way, the yoking of such divergent philosophical styles. As a buddingphilosopher and cinphile in the late 40s and into the 50s, involved in a complex waywith the then-reigning phenomenological paradigm, Deleuze must have paid specialattention to Andr Bazins great essays in Esprit, a journal whose rapport withphenomenology was explicit, and whose guiding philosophical intelligence was PaulRicoeur. Ricoeur was only intermittently in Paris during the decade after the war;nevertheless, his close relation to Esprit would have brought him into contact with Bazin,who like him was a disciple of its charismatic editor Emmanuel Mounier. Moreover,Ricoeur had been led by Gabriel Marcel to think philosophy through art, particularlydrama. With Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Amede Ayfre writing about cinema in theseyears, we should expect Ricoeur to have been intrigued by this art, which was, underBazins aegis, inflating its ambitions to the limit. And so I am permitted to imagine alost chapter in Dosses biography. It details the chance encounters among Ricoeur,Deleuze, and Bazin at the Cinmathque Franaise or at Truffauts Cin-club de lasalle noire. The bifurcated temporality that both Ricoeur and Deleuze develop in the1980s Bazin effectively wrote about in his 1950 Orson Welles, the first auteur study Iknow of. As much as the pith of Proust, the complexly perspectival world of Wellesand of the modernist idea of cinema that flourished in postwar Pariscould have setboth Ricoeur and Deleuze on their paths, which would cross decades later on the questionof temporality.

    Compared to Deleuze, Ricoeur has pursued his path in a patient and long-suffering manner, two of his many virtues. These complement the beatitude that Themeek shall inherit the earth, which can just as easily be read as a slogan for a crusade.Meekly, Ricoeurs thought has infiltrated numerous domains in the humanities and socialsciences, producing a high-minded, sententious kind of resistance. To calculate the impactof his workaday ethic, it is enough to note that Ricoeur directed the thesis or served asmentor to Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancire, Vincent Descombes,

  • diacritics / summer 2000 45

    Jean-Franois Lyotard, and Michel de Certeau [PR 25455]. He has left his mark, andmore.

    While the Protestant faith he has steadfastly professed may not have directed ororganized his strictly philosophical undertakings (a philosophical Christian rather thana Christian philosopher, he circumspectly calls himself), it has decidedly affected hisreception in France and abroad. He was ignored for years, then vilified in FrancebutChristian intellectuals throughout Europe welcomed him. At his direst moment, afterthe disaster he suffered at Nanterre in 1970, he accepted a three-year post at the CatholicUniversity of Louvain in Belgium. The crucial rapport that he has maintained with theUniversity of Chicago dates from the same period (teaching in the Divinity Schoolrather than in the department of philosophy, from which he always felt alienated evenwhen offering for them popular seminars in Continental thought). In Paris, by contrast,Ricoeur endured the contempt of prestigious peers for keeping religion within the orbitof his concerns. Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan refused to takehim seriously or to engage in the dialogue he always invites. Their immense influenceturned students away from reading him. He was taken to be a throwback to another ageof philosophy, addressing an audience of graying parishioners. When he was forced toresign as dean of Nanterre University in 1970, it was as if this view had been officiallyconfirmed. At the same moment, Foucault emerged as a hero of the radical youth andwas elevated to a chair at the Collge de France, which he took in direct competitionwith Ricoeur [PR 51718].

    But the pendulum has swung the other way. English readers have been able toregister Ricoeurs reemergence in the past two decades through the instantaneoustranslation of his books, the appearance of an 830-page compilation of his interchangeswith other thinkers, edited by Louis Hahn for the Library of Living Philosophers series,and Charles E. Reagans amiable Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work. In France Ricoeurhas been ever more prominent in the media and in public exchanges with high-profilepeers from the hard and social sciences. Increasingly, scholars in domains such as historyand cinema studies have cited him. And then in 1997 came Dosses nearly 800-pagePaul Ricoeur: Les sens dune vie. Dosse took on this project following his indispensabletwo-volume History of Structuralism. Evidently in preparing that study he encounteredRicoeur again and again as someone at odds with, or to the side of, the dominant trendsin postwar French intellectual life [Dosse interview]. Determining to readdress the periodthrough Ricoeur turns out to have been not only a fair but an astute decision, for Ricoeurgives Dosse entre to traditions of thought that precede structuralism and persist after it,trends that Ricoeur has been at pains to put in dialogue with structuralism and its avatars.

    Although Dosse may originally have taken up Ricoeur as a convenience to roundout his picture of the past half-century, the man soon emerges in Dosses book as perhapsits most responsive and responsible thinker. Given enough time and sufficient occasions,Ricoeurs modesty and doggedness have been rewarded even in a country that prizesostentation and flair. This would be the hagiographic explanation: Ricoeur, philosopherof will, has triumphed by sheer good will, not by the will to power. Dosse charts therise to power of Ricoeurs goodness, finding in his achievement of continuity an antidoteto the discontinuity of our age. But if Ricoeur has managed to engage intellectual fadsseriously, letting his own ideas be inflected by the signs of the times, a more structuralrather than biographical analysis would examine precisely those signs and those times,finding it logical that the general malaise of French thought after poststructuralism andparticularly in a postcommunist period should provoke a return to ethics (as in EmmanuelLevinas). From this perspective, what Dosse calls Ricoeurs consecration is merelyanother moment in the self-propelled movement of fashion, and this biography forms acontinuation, not the obverse, of his volumes on structuralism.

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    Empathy and Biography

    The shape and style of this biography emulate the ethos of its central character. Dossedubs Ricoeur un matre penser, someone who unobtrusively elicits and extendsthinking; this, to distinguish him from the lionized matres penseurs of the last half-century, the fashion-model masterthinkers named Lacan, Althusser, Derrida, Barthes,Bourdieu, et al. [PR 600; Dosse interview]. The abundance of the books research andthe range of topics addressed in its seventy chapters try to match Ricoeurs own drive tobe comprehensive in each of his studies and in their accumulated thrust. Where mostbiographies of intellectuals aim to account for the development of ideas in the events ofa life, Ricoeurs rather eventless life tempts Dosse to reverse the direction, explainingthe person as in fact a product of the ideas. As in one of Ricoeurs hermeneutic studies,Dosse feels obliged to take seriously each position Ricoeur has encountered, from theempiricism of his first philosophy teacher in high school to a more sophisticated formof the same philosophy in the work of the neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux, withwhom he recently debated [Changeux and Ricoeur].

    Although he associates mainly with the greats in philosophy, theology, and literature,Ricoeur dismisses personality and character, dissolving biography into a vast culturalfield of reading and discussion. Personality amounts to a style of reading andinterpretation, a tailored trajectory of detours and displacements made in passing fromone knotty issue to another, always in search of solid ground. But personal identity, likeontology, is an unfinished project, a constantly receding horizon that orients but doesnot constitute a life. Dosse accepts Ricoeurs beliefas much an intellectual position asa private desirethat the subject is best known indirectly. Deciding not to access Ricoeurhimself, he pursued his work from the outside, interviewing scores of those who haveknown him, reading Ricoeur the reader. And he has done so with the same forthrightnessand generosity that characterize Ricoeurs reading and writing. No dramatic or secretmoments bring instant illumination to this life. Nothing is hidden, except, of course, thetruth itself, which the life is ever in search of. Ricoeurs strongest ideas involve narrativeidentity, a fact that prompts Dosse to discover his subject only through encounters withothers, in a drama of decentering and contextualization, as Ricoeur expands andtransforms his thought, his concerns, and, if we can use the contested term, himself.

    Dosse adopts Ricoeurs favored posture: by maintaining a forthright yet deflectedapproach, he arrives at a second, or deliberated, naivet. Other biographers might havedwelt psychoanalytically on Ricoeur the orphan of World War I, striving to grow intothe father whom that war took from him; or on the usurpation of his life by an interminableprogram of academic labor. (We are told that he has the constitution to write twelvehours a day on a routine basis.) But Dosse, except in one instance, triangulates thepersonality of his subject, pinpointing his relation to one thinker after another. Theexceptional instance is the suicide of one of Ricoeurs five children in 1987. This chapter,titled La traverse du mal absolu, shows Ricoeur grappling directly with somethinghe cannot assimilate to a higher good or to the order of understanding. This worst ofprivate tragedies changed his writing and his demeanor; yet, in Dosses account, it madehim all the more himself, becoming the somber impetus behind his master work,published in 1990, Soi-mme comme un autre (Oneself as Another).

    What makes Ricoeurs trajectory of reading and interpretation so worth tracking?Philosophe de la Cit, he exists as a public intelligence with the public good ever inmind. Rarely calling upon arcane sources, Ricoeur returns to the traditionfrom Platoand Aristotle to Heidegger and Austinto reorient mainstream philosophy by protectingit from extremes. And he has consistently made use of philosophy to disentangle publiccontroversies and to plead for responsible action. Dosses long book lays out one

  • diacritics / summer 2000 47

    intellectual, political, religious, or pedagogical situation after another, locating Ricoeursneed to respond, and then detailing that response through excellent summaries of histexts. Along the way we are treated to succinct reviews of the work of major writers(Gabriel Marcel, Karl Barth, Edmund Husserl, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Claude Lvi-Strauss)and of some forgotten ones as well (the political philosopher Andr Philip, for instance,or Ricoeurs rival in the fifties, Tran Duc Thao, the brilliant Husserl scholar who leftParis to help build a government in Hanoi only to return, after the Vietnam War, out offavor, destitute, and without a country). Occasionally Dosse indulges our taste for gossipof the high and the mighty, as when he details several egregious instances of Lacansunpardonably haughty behavior toward the ingenuous Ricoeur. On the whole, however,Ricoeurs devotion to the interplay and also to the fair play of ideas diminishes personaland professional drama. Dosse is convinced (and he convinces us) that Ricoeurs approachto the life of the mind, to life itself, is vigorously healthy. Regardless of the positions hehas upheld over the years (most of which, in Dosses survey, seem apropos, consistent,and liberating, though seldom brilliant), his selflessly virtuous attitude, at once passionateand reflective, has had a salubrious effect in a world where top intellectuals seem moreoften to behave like politicians and celebrities.

    As a public intellectual, Ricoeur is best defined by the situations into which heinserted himself. Dosse parses his life into ten sections: the 1930s; the experience of theprisoner-of-war camp; the period of reflection in the mountain village of Chambon,194648; the University of Strasbourg, 194856; the nonconformist in the heart of theSorbonne, 195764; facing up to the masters of suspicion (Althusser, Lacan, Lvi-Strauss,Greimas), 196070; the adventure of the University at Nanterre, 196570; eclipse inFrance and the detour through America, 197085; recognition and triumph; a philosopherin the Cit. Each section contains chapters that highlight, in turn, the spheres of Ricoeursconcerns: political and pedagogical conflicts, philosophical problems and challenges,religious and theological issues, the extended family circle within which he has workedand lived; international contacts. His has been a life of words, those of ancient thinkershe has drawn on, of current thinkers he has promoted, of courses he has taught, ofcontroversial journal articles he has penned or reacted to, of memorable lectures he hasgiven and others he has attended. Over 1500 names show up in the index, a roster ofthose whose ideas have mattered over the last century, and not just in France.

    Indeed, not just in France. Dosse makes us believe that of the many Frenchintellectuals who have struck up relations with one American university or another,Ricoeur has profited most from the interchange. His years at Chicago have altered theway he gives seminars in Paris, turning them into dynamic sessions of give-and-take,rather than the edifying lectures that are the norm in the French system. Nor would hisrecent books exist without the influence of Anglo-American philosophy (Austin,Strawson, Davidson, Parfitt, and so on). More recently, he has left the door open for adialogue with Asian philosophers and religious thinkers, wanting ever to multiply pointsof view on questions of Being. Ricoeur does not expect the truth from any interlocutor,each necessarily finite, but he does expect to understand better whatever questions bothhe and that interlocutor (whether ancient Greek or contemporary Japanese) have cometo address.

    Ricoeurs hermeneutics constitutes a faith in the human quest for Being, as muchas a method for understanding questions posed of Being. In this Ricoeur edges close toBazins Ontology, wherein cinematography allows us to access reality, but only fromshifting and always finite perspectives. The art of making and watching films, like thepractice of interpretation, is a discipline of establishing and multiplying perspectives onreality. Languages, styles, and ideologies mix and clash, yet according to these men,they do so over issues that stretch before and beyond all views.

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    Ricoeur puts divergent views to work, setting them one against the other, chartinga route from one problematic to the next, as he keeps the dialogue of philosophy movingforward. And so one finds in Dosses biographyand then supremely throughoutRicoeurs oeuvreexceptionally clear recapitulations of key issues in Husserl, Freud,Althusser, Greimas, Derrida, and many others. But Ricoeur is no encyclopedist. Heneeds to cut cleanly to the center of the positions involved because his own positionencompasses the dialogue between, say, phenomenology and structuralism or betweensemiotics and the theory of reference. His hermeneutics defines itself as a method tobreak through the limits of positions and vocabularies. Something more, somethingpotentially liberating, becomes available to the understanding when vocabularies brushup against one another. Sometimes, as in metaphor, one field is helpfully redescribed bya foreign vocabulary (for example, mythology newly understood in the language ofstructural linguistics); sometimes two vocabularies open onto a domain that neithercould access alone (historiography and narratology allowing a conception of narrativeidentity). Ricoeur has had to counter insinuations of eclecticism. He would call hisdisplays of erudition strategic; they allow him either to triangulate his own emergingviews or (to use his definition of metaphor) to remap a philosophical problem entirely,allowing it to come into view in an entirely new way.

    Situations and Trajectories

    Ricoeurs piety before great thinkers and his taste for abstract ideas were undoubtedlyabetted by the sermons he was asked each Sunday to meditate on. While he dutifullypursued high school and undergraduate philosophy courses, his nascent social andreligious imagination was ignited by the vibrant non-conformism of 1930s France.Extracurricular philosophy for Ricoeur included Bergson on one side and the faddishGerman philosophers on the other (Nietzsche, to be sure, followed by Husserl, Heidegger,and the return of Hegel via Alexandre Kojves much-discussed courses). Where Deleuzewould resuscitate the Bergson and Nietzsche of the 1890s with the two wonderful bookshe wrote in the 1960s, Ricoeur encountered Bergson as virtually a contemporary, indeedas the author of Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, a best-seller when heread it in 1932. Ricoeur at nineteen was just finishing his baccalaureate at Rennes,under a Neo-Thomist who pushed him to read the canon systematically and with rigor,and for whom Bergson, despite having moved toward Catholicism, was forbidden fruit.In any case, Bergsons day had passed with the Great War; his popularity was with thepublic, not with those who taught and studied at the Sorbonne. Although Ricoeur didnot directly study Bergson, many in his circle had felt his influence; and he could onlybe impressed with a philosophy that dealt with pressing problems in an engaged, decidedlynonscholastic style. Philosophy could, in short, be alive. Ricoeur set off from Rennes insearch of this life, first by moving to Paris, and then by looking outside the academicenvironment dominated there by the lucubratory neo-Kantian Lon Bruschwicg, withwhom he wrote a masters thesis.

    In Paris, Ricoeur found the vivacity he was looking for in Gabriel Marcel, whoserenowned Fridays he assiduously attended as an antidote to his courses at the Sorbonne.Refreshingly unacademic, Marcel insisted that his salons be free of the weight ofphilosophical authority and that they deal with matters of existence, not method. Yearafter year, political, social, religious, and aesthetic issues were presented by theparticipants who thought them through without the support or clarification of canonicalformulations. Sartre and Levinas were among those who attended from time to time,doubtless shaking things up with the Husserl and Heidegger they had studied in Germany.

  • diacritics / summer 2000 49

    (Sartre would always disdain Marcel for his conversion to Catholicism, and perhapsbecause he had preceded him as a successful playwright.) Young activists came as well,full of the fiery discourse erupting each month in such upstart journals as Ordre nouveau,Prsences, and Raction. Marcel encouraged nonconformist thought-in-action; and inthe freedom and moral seriousness of this fellowship Ricoeur presented his first genuinelypersonal disquisition, Justice, a topic on which he continues to write to this day.

    In the cauldron of the Popular Front era, the young Ricoeur could speak of justiceas more than a philosophical issue. Calvinist, he argued against Karl Barths Lutheranismthat Christianity must transform, not turn its back on, the world. Transformation shouldmove from reflection to action, he wrote in Hic et nunc, one of the short-lived leftistjournals on whose edges he hovered during the entire decade. A Protestant organ publishedout of Andr Gides apartment, where Denis de Rougemont, one of its directors, wasliving in 1936, Hic et nunc meant to serve as a site for intellectual transformation, likethe more radical ETRE and Terre nouvelle. The latter, a journal of revolutionaryChristianity, sported a cross as well as a hammer and sickle on its cover, and so wascondemned by the Vatican and Moscow alike. In one of its issues Ricoeur proclaimedhimself a pacifist who nonetheless must advocate intervention of the international lefton behalf of Republican Spain. In these complex days he drew closest to Esprit (foundedin 1932), establishing a relationship with Emmanuel Mounier that would flourish afterthe war. Mounier represented something like Marcel in action.

    But it was not just the pressing politics of the day that pushed Ricoeur beyond thosecozy Fridays at Marcels apartment. His commitment to the act of reading led him todistrust the primacy of personal reflection that Marcel persistently advocated. The tworetained great affection for each other, however. Marcel was the first person to greetRicoeur upon his return from captivity in 1945, and it is to Marcel that in 1950 Ricoeurdedicated the first volume of his own philosophy, Freedom and Nature. In the late 60sthey published a wonderful book together, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond. On the surfacea set of radio interviews of Marcel by Ricoeur, in fact this book constitutes a sympatheticand productive dialogue, dialogue being the cast of thought and speech they mutuallyuphold as primary.

    Dialogue clarifies differences and filiations. While Ricoeur worries that Marcelcan be charged with murkiness and lack of method, no one can question his courage toface philosophy bare-handed. The twin topics Marcel introduced in the second part ofhis path-breaking Journal mtaphysique, and then pursued in later studies, The Mysteryof Being and Incarnated Thought, are scattered throughout Ricoeurs books andbecome the focus of his essay on Marcel written in 1984 [Lectures 2 5053]. Ricoeurhas tried to answer to the depth of both mystery and body, but in a way that sheds onthem the brightest possible light, something Marcel, a man of music and literature asmuch as a philosopher, never cared to do. Marcels existential phenomenology growsout of his experience with art, which he felt could tell us more than pure philosophicalanalysis about the topics that mattered to him, such as identity. In Bergonism andMusic, he described the figure of the theme as welling up from an anonymous pastin the music listener who intuits it and recognizes its aptness. Marcel describes thisquasi-past as not any particular section of a historical becoming, more or less explicitlyassimilated to a movement in space, such as a film sequence. It is rather the inner depthsof oneself . . . sentimental perspectives according to which life can be relived not as aseries of events but to the extent that it is an indivisible unity which can only beapprehended as such through art [Bergsonism and Music 149].

    Ricoeurs later ideas, particularly on living metaphor and narrative identity,can be seen in germ here in Marcels ideas: a composer and his hearers encounter eachother in the figure of a musical theme which satisfies an expectation that is discovered

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    only in the hearing of it. This anonymous past, colored by personal nuance characterizesnot only our response to music but our relation to culture generally. We are born not tocreate meaning from the isolated point of our existence (Sartre, Descartes); we are bornalready belonging to meanings that we gradually discover, recognize, modify, make ourown in returning to. Marcel shared with Sartre the sense of the essential risk ofsubjectivity, its insubstantiality, but Marcels faith waited in the expectation that thisrisk would reap dividends of authenticity upon its maturation. Never self-confident inits being, a self nevertheless can proceed confidently on a road called genuineness,whose final destination remains ever the road: Homo viator.

    Dosse picks up an echo of homo viator in his subtitle, for Les sens dune viecharacterizes its subject, Ricoeur, as engaging meanings (sens) but only as someonewhose thought is en route. Like Marcel, Ricoeur holds no doctrine but follows a direction(sens) with a distinct trajectory and continuity. And yet one can precisely plot everyzigzag, detour, and sudden breakthrough of his journey, since these all take place on theimmense map of philosophy with whose coordinates he, far more than Marcel, orientshimself. When faced with a problem, Ricoeurs characteristic first movement isbackwards, retreat. This term bears a prominent pedigree, Ricoeur adopting it fromGabriel Marcel, who was ever suspicious of progressivism, positivism, scientism,dialectical Hegelianism. Marcel counseled retreat when faced with a mystery, aconundrum in which one is intimately involved (unlike a mere problem to be solved).In pulling back within the self, in a mood of recollection, one can scan the inner landscape,including ones resources, heritage, and situation, not to mention ones affections, beforeleaping forward in a calculated risk of thought.

    Marcels dramatic and highly personal manner of doing philosophy is bolstered bya French tradition one can trace to Montaigne and Pascal. His modern progenitor,however, is Maine de Biran,who at the outset of the nineteenth century initiated a styleof personal thought from the literal retreat that, as a nobleman, he was forced to makeduring the French Revolution. Marcels Journal mtaphysique takes its cue from Mainede Birans Journal intime, a sustained reflection on the inner life, beginning at what hethought was the beginning: the sensations of the body responding to an exterior field ofobjects and other selves [see Gouhier]. After a generation of the determinism of theFrench philosophes, Maines recovery of free will within the material world (enactedthrough corporeal powers of vision and movement) set the stage for Bergsons subsequentelaboration of the topic at the end of the century in Matter and Memory.

    Bergsons great book, which Deleuze championed all his life, which Marcel wasbeholden to (he dedicated his Journal mtaphysique to Bergson), and which Ricoeurcontritely agrees is a masterpiece he has yet adequately to address [Ricoeur, Azouvi,and Launay 18889], couches the existential human drama in proto-scientific terms.Bergson alternates between neuroscientist and reflective philosopher, taking both parts,as it were, in the same sort of dialogue Ricoeur and Changeux would exchange a centurylater [see Changeux and Ricoeur]. He doesnt shrink from describing the human brainas a relay between sensation and action, but crucially he adds that this relay works witha built-in delay [Matter and Memory 30]. Consciousnessreflectiontakes place inand as this delay when, faced with some situation in the present, layers within a volumeof memory are traversed and sampled before the organism adjusts its stance and reactsto face the future. Marcel was struck by this image of consciousness as time spent in amemory vault. He conceived of this vault, as did Bergson and Maine de Biran, in personalterms, the self as unplumbed volume of depth. Ricoeur, who cites Marcel, Husserl, andMaine de Biran as key influences on the same page of his Intellectual Autobiography[Hahn 12], would likely characterize this vault as some sort of library, full of volumes,whose ideas, sentiments, and positions shuffle in constant interplay and to which we

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    turn when conning experience. Libraries form second lines of retreat when inner resourcesfail and we must think further and otherwise. Unlike Marcel, Ricoeur accorded directinterior reflection little credit. How quick he is to burrow into the further recesses of thelibrary and from there into the meandering ideas of individual volumes. As he puts it,hermeneutic distanciation is a variant of Husserls phenomenological epoch [Rflexionfaite 58], a way to achieve clarity and to depersonalize immediate experience.

    The value and practice of retreat, surely ingrained early on in his religious educationand then in his formative discussions with Marcel, became Ricoeurs de facto mode ofexistence during the 1940s. So too did the German language and German philosophy,which he had begun systematically to study after 1936. For Ricoeur was captured in1940 and sequestered in a prison camp in Poland for the duration of the war. Miraculously,he found himself incarcerated with other intellectuals, including Mikel Dufrenne, theKantian phenomenologist who would remain a lifelong friend. Dosse paints a vividpicture of this odd refuge of philosophy, supported by a modest library of donated booksthat included the complete works of Karl Jaspers and the Ideen of Husserl. Ricoeurmade an interlinear translation of the latter, while he and Dufrenne systematically wentthrough the Jaspers, preparing a coauthored study that would come out in 1948. Theyperfected their German and improvised lectures, Ricoeur extemporizing on Nietzschewithout notes at one memorable session. Once released, rather than throw himself likemost of his contemporaries into the work of reconstructing Frances cultural institutions,he took his family to the mountain village of Chambon, which had been a literal refugefor Jewish children during the war. Invited to teach in this idyllic community by AndrPhillip, the charismatic social activist whom he had known in Protestant circles in the30s, he effectively opted out of the postwar struggles for cultural power. Ricoeur in themountains, like Christ in the desert, tested himself and his ideas in complete isolation.Subsisting on very little for three cold years, he used this haut lieu de retraite to finishhis doctoral thesis, his Husserl translation, and the Jaspers book (when Dufrenne cameto visit). He also tried out on very young students the courses he would soon give at hisfirst university post in Strasbourg.

    Ricoeur brought to Strasbourg a certain brand of French postwar existentialism,especially that of Marcel and Merleau-Ponty, which he bolstered with the more rigorousphenomenology of Husserl. Beyond Ideen and Husserls other published books, Ricoeurcould now study thousands and thousands of pages of the masters notes just uncoveredin a Belgian archive. Ricoeur staked his claim to become their principal overseer, aposition he would inherit from Merleau-Ponty. This was more than academic curatorialwork, for Husserls particularism formed the mentalist obverse of Marcels carnalapproach. While Ricoeur would ultimately recognize how different were thephenomenologies they practiced, they equally contributed to founding a conception ofthe person. Crucial here is Husserls doggedness in filling the interstitial zone betweenintention and sheer sensation. When supplemented by his Phenomenology of InternalTime Consciousness, this zone in effect becomes for Husserl the site of the person,including style and continuity.

    Ricoeur understood Husserls abstract formulations to underlie the personal andpolitical ideas (he could not term it philosophy) of Mounier, without the latters realizingit. In chapter five of his summary book of 1946, Quest ce que le personnalisme?,Mounier calls on Marcel, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, and Maine de Biran to help him accountfor the double alienation afflicting modern human beings (from the world and fromother people) [see Mounier]. Ricoeur grew very close to Mounier just before the lattersdeath in 1950 while Ricoeur was translating Husserls Ideen. Evidently Mounier hopedto recruit a heavy-hitting philosopher, as he might a lawyer, to validate his socialmovement in the eyes of the academic court. In a most happy moment, Ricoeur

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    contributed his abstract intellectual work (on Husserl and Marcel) to the social reach ofPersonalism and its journal, Esprit, for which he began to write regularly and where hefound, as Dosse puts it, a collective intellectual identity of a community of hope [PR57].

    As with Marcel, Ricoeur believed he had to step beyond Husserl, but never beyondHusserls desire to grasp life at its immediate points of contact. Modest, Ricoeur doubtedthat he (or anyone) could fulfill this desire unaided. In fact, contra Marcel and contraHusserl, he readily declared the need for precedent formulations, not so much to lean onas to think with into the future. And so, although his philosophy is suspended betweenthe quest (modernist and Husserlian) to build things up anew and a belief (moretraditional) that mankind has ever confronted the selfsame problem of rememberingexistencea problem Marcel encouraged everyone to pose as though for the very firsttimeRicoeur has formalized what appears a most standard philosophical practice,that of reading and interpreting earlier philosophers. Hermeneutics names the practicehe would eventually adopt to mediate problems that have been deliberately posed byphenomenology as immediate. Hermeneutic phenomenology, at first an oxymoron, comesto stand for contact with existence that is culturally shared before being taken as personal.Ricoeur enlarges the temporality at the heart of phenomenology beyond the subject,until it stretches across centuries on the wings of interpretation, while remainingauthentically human. This aspiration he shares with Gadamer, though he invariably turnstoward the future and toward action, whereas Gadamers constant concern is with traditionand the past.

    The built-in cultural dimension of Ricoeurs philosophical program fits perfectly apersonality that thrives on dialogue and social concern. At Strasbourg from 1948 to1956 he enjoyed fertile interaction with a close-knit group of colleagues and students,in both philosophy and theology. He treasured good conversation about serious topicsin the classroom, in the extremely active Esprit study group, and in his religiouscongregation. Building on the reservoir of reading notes and ideas accumulated duringhis isolation in the 1940s, his courses grew in reputation and variety, as did hispublications. Called to the Sorbonne in 1957, he would leave forever the conventionalsatisfactions of provincial university life for a far more consequential public arena.

    In Paris, as Dosse recounts it, Ricoeur could not help but become involved incontemporary social issues discussed in the journals he kept up with. He arrived at theSorbonne after having just lobbed into the public sphere three pieces on the response ofthe West to China, which Dosse finds feeble but which indicate a new sense ofresponsibility to the larger world of politics. Almost immediately came the Hungarianuprising that split the left over Stalin; hardly had this storm diminished than the brutaldebate over Algeria escalated. Ricoeur took an immediate and forthright stand againstcolonization; he found himself questioned by the police for hiding soldiers desertingfrom that war. His name could be found on petitions, in theological debates, and on thepages of a range of journals. His bibliography shows a surprising number of addressesconcerning topics as diverse as science, youth, internment camps, communism, andZionism [Hahn 64653].

    In all this Esprit felt like his home; for there, in the spirit of a Personalism imbibedthrough Husserl, Marcel, and Mounier, he could write without condescension on mattersat once philosophical and directly political. So closely did he identify with its principlesthat in the late 1950s he would be thought of as the next director, Protestant though hewas. Esprit literally became his home in 1957 when he moved into Les Murs Blancs inChtenay-Malebray just to the south of Paris. Mounier had bought this lovely propertywith its three buildings in 1939 and shared it with other Personalists. Even after a 1957shake-up in editorial direction, Chtenay-Malebray maintained itself as a unique

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    intellectual and moral community. Dosse describes with envy an ambience of generositysufficiently utopian to quiet the occasional conflicts of position and personality thatinevitably arose among the men, women, and dozen children who lived there in closecompanionship.

    Chtenay-Malebray effectively served as the editorial headquarters for Esprit, wherefriends and adherents, often more than fifty strong, regularly gathered to planand toexchange views ontopics the journal had decided to feature. Ricoeurs views invariablyput him on the left even by Esprits standards. In 1960 he took it upon himself to organizean issue of the journal devoted to sexual mores, in order to bring Esprit into contact withcontemporary concerns and with a changing society. But it was his grasp of the conundrumposed by the Soviet Union as putative leader of world socialism that gained Ricoeur thegreatest respect. In the May 1957 issue of Esprit his Le paradoxe politique appeared,an essay that even today draws praise for its independence and breadth. As usual helined up extremists on both sides (Hegel on the side of the state, Marx on that of distrustor resentment), insisting that both be given their due in a synthetic political stance.More heretically, he chided Marx for having left politics out of his 100 percentsocioeconomic analysis. This lacuna permitted anyone (Lenin and Stalin, as it turnedout) to develop every sort of political mechanism in the name of furthering Marxsgoals, including the military oppression of Hungary in the current instance [Ricoeur,Azouvi, and Launay 95]. Elaborating ideas Hannah Arendt was making famous at justthis time (he would write the preface for the French translation of The Human Condition),Ricoeur distinguishes power, exercised vertically by strata and associated with evil,from politics, a horizontal practice associated with being together. He could notcountenance the paternalism of the USSR at the time but adamantly refused the lure ofso-called American democracy saturated with commercialism. While he practicedprecisely the Personalism that was the legacy of Esprit from the 1930s on, he developeda philosophical vocabulary to justify this third way.

    This period of activism subsided in the 60s as Ricoeur found himself engaged inall-consuming academic debates and in the internal politics of the University of Paris.Quite unfairly he became linked to the establishment, despite his quite progressive ideas.Anyone who believed in institutions (and Ricoeur believes in their inevitable importanceas well as their imperfection) was suspect. More than one former intransigent radicalwho had loathed Ricoeur in the days of the seizure of Nanterre later came to appreciate,indeed to revere, him after rereading his many social essays [PR 601]. Ricoeursconsistently thoughtful leftism, and the action he has personally taken or supported inthe face of a range of social causes, gain compound interest each year until its worthstacks up well against the now devalued rhetoric of the blustery firebrands of 1968.Since Dosse was schooled in that generation, Paul Ricoeur: Les sens dune vie has theair of a penance expiating the arrogance of an earlier period. This shift in the tone ofacademic discourse can be measured by the ascendancy of Emmanuel Levinas, whosereputation surely helped resuscitate the prominence of his friend and colleague PaulRicoeur. From the 1930s to the end of the century, both men submitted Germanphenomenology (Husserl and Heidegger respectively) to the primacy of ethics and justice,which they considered not corollaries to philosophy but its very heart [Ricoeur,Autrement].

    Paradigms and Positions

    As recently as 1990, when Levinas characterized Ricoeurs thought approvingly asphenomenological, the latter did not deny it [Ricoeur, Aeschlimann, and Halprin

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    3537]; on the other hand he has styled himself a sort of post-Kantian, if only throughHusserl and Nabereven a post-Hegelian Kantian, as I jokingly call myself [Ricoeur,Azouvi, and Launay 83]. The program of existential phenomenologyto graspprereflective experience through reflectionoccupied the first phase of Ricoeurs career,but it did so ambivalently. His early books on Marcel and Karl Jaspers questioned theideal of the unity of the human person, whether the itinerant view (Marcel) or thetragic view (Jaspers). Even Sartres far more careful and complex writing ultimatelyfalls prey, in Ricoeurs opinion, to an immature desire for unity. Ricoeurs Kantianismemerges time and again to map the limits of thinking in the murkier areas of humanexperience that phenomenology is drawn to. Kant can be felt in Ricoeurs penchant forkeeping modes of experience (invariably three of them) autonomous but interacting.Both philosophers define the limits beyond which reason cannot pass, while Kantvalidates the central place Ricoeur accords imagination, the single faculty that animatesevery mode and every concern.

    Appropriately, the imagination was the focus of the course Ricoeur prepared in hismountain retreat just after the war. Never published as such, this syllabus would inflecthis writing for the next half-century, both because of its topic and because of the logic ofits exposition. In Ricoeurs outline, recovered and presented by Dosse, everything beginswith a descriptive phenomenology in the manner of Maine de Biran and, of course,Sartre, so as to catch the operation of the imagination. Ricoeur describes the structure ofsimple experiences of illusion and then moves to ever more complex functions, fromdaydreaming to art and religion. Having grasped the process from the inside, Ricoeurthen moves outside, where Sartre refused to go, deconstructing the imagination withwhatever disciplines claim to explain its presence and its operations (sociology,psychology, psychoanalysis). Then comes that third moment Ricoeur always insistsupon, the moment of synthesis wherein the process (here the imagination), despite thecritique it has undergone, instructs us in its unique way. In this case a poetics reintegratesall levels and all forms of the imagination. Poetics, the name for the study of the specificityof imaginative texts, also serves, in the manner of Kants Critique of Judgment, to justifyfaith in the validity of taste and of reason, including that very critical reason that put theimagination under suspicion.

    Thus in 1947, before having yet published a book or named hermeneutics as hismethod, Ricoeur displays in the embryo of a syllabus what will become his idiosyncraticapproach. He also displays his fundamental ethos in so adamantly refusing to allowreflection on experience to get trapped in exclusive concern with self. Always he woulddistribute self-concern across a field of meaning, reference, and ultimately action, viaproductive encounters with texts and other selves. While Ricoeur consistently exhibitsthis method and approach on various topics, the particular topic of the imagination mustbe privileged as the motor of productivity in every instance. The imagination will surfaceunmistakably in La mtaphore vive (1975) as that which pushes language beyond itself,and it underwrites the value of narrative, which after all is precisely a poetics oftemporality that thinks beyond the aporias of reason. Kantian critique allows Ricoeur toidentify aporias and to locate limits of thought, while poetics, underwritten by Kantsthird Critique, restores, if not unity, then at least the value of the human drive to attain it.

    The inevitable thwarting of this persistent human drive had been the core topic ofRicoeurs doctoral thesis. Under the global rubric Philosophy of the Will, he beganpublishing his immense personal philosophical project, volume one coming out in 1950as La volontaire et linvolontaire (Freedom and Nature) with the second part, Finitudeet culpabilit (Finitude and Guilt), coming a decade later. These titles certainly partakeof the problematic tone of existentialism, although it is Ricoeurs Kantian turn thathelps him confront determinism and wrest from it some space for human beings in our

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    ability to synthesize inventiveness with lawfulness. (This opposition returns again andagain in his thought, most notably in La Mtaphore vive, where it is raised to the basicprinciple of language use.) No theological compensation is offered for the scandal oflimitation and guilt, the desolate condition in which humans find themselves and whichis Ricoeurs goad to philosophize in the first place. In the idiom of phenomenology, hedescribes pre-human nature, that is, the state from which something like human natureemerges, including various personal styles of responding to limitation, from the mostconsensual to the most rebellious. Ricoeur would say that all his later work, includinghis books on Freud, on language, and on narrative identity, is anchored in thisphenomenological description, which runs in parallel through the three separate butinteracting spheres he adapts from Kant: the spheres of knowledge, of action, and offeeling. In all three, the human constitutes a range of values that can virtually be graphedon two fundamental axes, that which runs from the particular (sense perception) to thegeneral (concept, language) and that which runs between origin and possibility, archand telos [see Klemm].

    Ricoeurs later books will depend on, but break free of, the convolutions ofintrospection that shape the usual course of existential phenomenology. Late in the 1950she deliberately took the step from personal to cultural experience and reflection whenhe split Finitude et culpabilit in two: volume 1, titled Fallible Man, remains in thereflective idiom, while volume 2, The Symbolism of Evil, locates the fault line inhuman nature through an exegesis of cultural expressions. Edging close to the work ofMircea Eliade, highly popular at the time, he turned first to symbols and then to mythsthat coordinate symbols into narratives. Although he ultimately judged this foray to beunsophisticated, it initiated what would become a lifelong series of detours en routeto a fuller but always partial and perspectival comprehension of lack. Indeed, ever after,Ricoeur would identify the route as a starting point and reject the conceptual clarityof radical origin, insisting that philosophy begin not at the beginning but in the midst ofthe meanings all around it. Hence the primacy of interpretation.

    In embarking on The Symbolism of Evil (1960), Ricoeur opted to employ thevocabulary of poetics on the one hand and of anthropology on the other, two of thehuman sciences that were coming to the fore at just this moment and that he wouldneed to address head on. His admiration for Merleau-Ponty, always high, soared in aeulogy he composed in 1961 [see Lectures 2], which recognized Merleau-Pontys audacityin supplementing philosophy with the disciplines of linguistics, sociology, psychology,and history. Ricoeur took up Merleau-Pontys baton in full knowledge that existentialismwas ceding power to les sciences humaines, a paradigm shift visible in all fields. Marxistswho had followed Sartre now had to adjust to the new force of Louis Althusser. IndeedSartre was felt to have been knocked off his position when in 1962 Claude Lvi-Straussconcluded The Savage Mind (dedicated to the memory of Merleau-Ponty) with theextraordinary epilogue History and Dialectic.

    Ricoeur, while never close to Sartre, might nevertheless have been expected to takehis side, and indeed the editors of Esprit campaigned to defend humanism against thehuman sciences in the name of agency and freedom. But Ricoeur in effect adoptedMerleau-Pontys expansive role in his interchanges with Lvi-Strauss. As Dosse reportsit, Ricoeur looked not to debate Lvi-Strauss so much as to apprentice in anthropologyand linguistics if only to emerge from the cul de sac of The Symbolism of Evil. And so heconstituted a Lvi-Strauss study group at Esprit. For several years running he conductedcourses that minutely dissected the arguments and contents of an anthropology ofAmerican Indians that posed as a study of human nature in the universal sense. Alongthe way, Ricoeur schooled himself deeply in the structural linguistics so crucial not justto Lvi-Strauss but to Roland Barthes, A. J. Greimas, and Jacques Lacan.

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    Thus Ricoeurs 1967 riposte to Lvi-Strauss, Structure, Word, Event, representsthe fruit of a deep and partially sympathetic understanding of this alternative vision ofculture. His brilliant, characteristic move in this seminal essay was to interpose a termbetween the dyad langue/parole of Saussurian linguistics; that term, mot, carriesthick traces of theology and history, complicating what he saw as too simple a distinction.Every word, Ricoeur points out, bears in its etymology the sediment of prior uses thatamount to a history of experience. History can be accounted for neither by structuralrules (langue) nor by an accumulation of individual events (parole). Wordsles motsespecially in their evolution, are what bear tradition, heritage, and the credit humanbeings can draw on for a shared future. Structural analysis of texts may be indispensableto an explanation of their power to make meaning, but it is completely inadequate to thetask of comprehending their import and consequence. This much he retained from hisselective acceptance of Heidegger.

    Ricoeurs opponents in this argument were not just the famous names associatedwith les sciences humaines; they included theologians and biblical scholars as well.Indeed one could read Ricoeurs contestation with Lvi-Strauss, Greimas, Althusser,and Lacan as preparation for the more lethal battle he fought for a perspectival andpolyvalent view of the Bible and of religion against absolutists on the one hand andrelativists on the other. As has so often been the case in the life of a man for whom alldiscourses interrelate, biblical hermeneutics had laid the ground for, and was then thebeneficiary of, a renewed poetics. The literary work became for Ricoeur the prototypeof the intersection between the personal and the universal that marks his theologicalconcerns. For both the scriptural text and the poetic text can be considered fertile yetunfinished, open to a future that readers find themselves drawn to forge throughinterpretation and application. The literary work carries values released from the controlof its author. Like a word, it can be cited and taken up in distinct and quite differentmoments. Interpretation allows the poem to function fully at a distance from the eventor intentions that brought it about. Still, its force depends on its status as event, both asrecord of a process of composition (subject to psychoanalytic and ideological forces)and as goad to a process of appropriation in which those who encounter it take it into thefuture as part of their lives. Only its independence from any actual event allows it toplay this role as virtual event. And that independence results from its structuralorganization, the understanding of which is precisely the goal of the human sciences.Ricoeur recognizes what appear to be opposed approaches to literature (includingphenomenological elaboration, structural description and analysis, poetic interpretation,and historical contextualization), while at the same time making these approachesmutually interdependent in accounting for the richness of phenomena that go to the rootof human experience, like literature and religion.

    Ricoeurs reputation beyond those drawn to the theological reverberation of histhought took off with the 1965 publication of De linterpretation: Un essai sur Freud(translated in 1970 as Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation). What a daringcareer move this was. Caught within a self-justifying theological discourse that underlayeven his foray into anthropological poetics, The Symbolism of Evil, and sensing, alongwith Merleau-Ponty in his final years, the entropy of phenomenology, Ricoeur abruptlyset out on the unlikely detour posed by psychoanalysis. Freud stood out as a challengeto his faith, his reason, his very sense of identity. To his credit, Ricoeur did not shrinkfrom thinking through Freud to the end. This meant locating the places where Freudianthought stops, its ends. Ricoeur was maligned in France for failing to take into accountFreuds legacy, particularly in Lacan. Indeed it was Lacan who most vilified Ricoeur forthis omission, even though Ricoeur attended Lacans seminars and did his best to havea dialogue with a man who, in Dosses account, was interested mainly in self-

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    aggrandizement. But in the United States, where his book had gestated as the 1964Terry lectures at Yale, Ricoeur became a most approachable French philosopher. Ricoeurgave us a Freud that was comprehensible, powerful, yet limited, as compared to LacansFreud, whose thought became intimidating, incomprehensible, and limitless.

    Freud allowed Ricoeur to raise the question closed to phenomenology concerningthat which lies beyond consciousness. Husserl had made room for the unreflectedareas off the horizon of every intuition of consciousness, but was constrained to believethat such zones literally exist only to the extent that they are available for eventual entryinto consciousness. Freuds unconscious, however, is far more radical: irretrievableto consciousness, it not only exists but controls the existence of the conscious subject.Ricoeurs religious upbringing may have permitted him to abandon the pride ofconsciousness, something unthinkable for Husserl. He echoes St. Paul: Consciousnessfinds itself by losing itself. It finds itself instructed and clarified after losing itself andits narcissism [Ricoeur and Ihde 153]. One must give over consciousness to the analystso as to receive in return another life in abundance. This is the miracle of therapy, amiracle few have experienced but which has been reported frequently enough to bolsterthe belief of the faithful in the truth of the unconscious and in the project of analysis.

    Might Ricoeur accept the humiliations to the ego exacted by psychoanalysis as aruse to convert the heathen [Ricoeur, Azouvi, and Launay 90]? Dosses account allowsus to imagine this. For Ricoeur claims that Freud, Marx, and a line of prophets ofextremity [see Megill] stemming from Nietzsche have torn down every institution,every monument of civilization, including the institution of the self, leaving humanitywith nothing but the movement of force and scattered elements of signification [Ricoeurand Ihde 148]. And yet these prophets evince a heroic embrace of a deeper truth thanthat whose edifice they have shattered. The result is a gain for consciousness. TheNietzschean overman, like the patient on the other side of psychoanalysis, has gained acertain adulthood of consciousness in recognizing and willing the loss of the dominanceof consciousness within existence. It is at this point that Ricoeur brings Hegel to bear, ina move that would haunt him for the next twenty-five years until the renunciation ofHegel at the end of Time and Narrative. Hegels developmental and suprapersonalPhenomenology of the Spirit represents the countercurrent of Freuds regressive analysisof the individual psyche. Where Freud traces experience to its infantile elements, Hegeltraces the maturation of the Spirit from its happy childhood phases in the figures ofthe Greek thinkers through its troubled skeptical figures that precede the adulthoodreached in Hegels own consciousness of Spirit. Ricoeur would locate in the institutionsof culture both the irrational sources of symbols (Freud mercilessly shows us these) andtheir fruits (Hegel promises their intelligibility). Symbols are once again the privilegedsites of both regression and progression, and of an analysis that breaks them down intothe forces and the primitive meanings that gave rise to them as well as into the possibilitieswith which their adult formulations allow us to think. Freud may take Oedipus back topatricide and incest, but Hegel recognizes in the blinded, castrated, wounded ego ofOedipus the wisdom that emerges at Colonus. Symbols provide the possibility of again of thought and of consciousness, even as they insist on a dispossession of theself.

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

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

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    caught on a tightrope like a circus monkey running back toward Freuds archaeologyand forward toward Hegels teleology, destiny driving him in both directions. And yetRicoeurs belief in the openness of the symbol would attract Deleuze. Both men willinglyrelinquish standard philosophy for the insights made possible by the disreputableintellectual fruits of art and (for Ricoeur at least) of religion. Even in the realm of art,however, they disagree about the extent of the openness of the symbol that tempts bothof them to think thought beyond consciousness. Insofar as Ricoeur follows Freud, thesymbol gives onto an expanded human nature, beginning with the immutable but hiddenstructure of the unconscious that inclines us to be as we are. Deleuze refuses theconstriction this implies. He rejects the primacy of nature, the organic, the hidden. Insteadhe sings of the virtual, the incompossible, the machinic. The Powers of the False arenot those of the unconscious that have been lurking beneath the surface all along, butthose that proliferateeven schizophrenicallyalong contours of life only the barestfraction of which come to consciousness and into reality. Deleuze makes us godsinsofar as we participate in this spread of the possible. Ricoeurs devotion to the expansionof meaning is driven by his faith in truths already gained by his forebears in philosophy,by artists of every epoch, and by contemporaries living and thinking differently butliving and thinking in the selfsame universe, one that is in part shareable, one that all ofus explore in our own fashion. When he announced on television that Philosophy forme is an anthropology [Marquette], Ricoeur meant to keep theological inquiry separatefrom the natural inquiry of philosophy. But the term anthropology aptly suits his wayof studying human being (including first of all himself) through other human beingsand through their practices.

    It should be evident, then, why, despite their wildly different styles of thought andexpression, Ricoeur and Deleuze have both been able to claim the interest of humanistsoutside the realm of philosophy proper. His two-volume treatise Cinema 1 and Cinema2 has made Deleuze essential reading in film studies, renewing that discipline at a timewhen it was in danger of dissolving into merely another site of cultural studies. Ricoeurhas tantalized literary scholars in an analogous way. His lengthy detour into metaphorand narrativefour large volumes appearing between 1975 and 1985offer a sustainedreflection and analysis on the nature and potential of literary discourse. Both men recruitimaginative and creative texts to replace or supplement philosophical ones. Invariablythese are drawn from the modernist paradigm. Deleuze showed himself an incrediblyversatile consumer of films, art, and fiction, able to write with genius on an extraordinarydiversity of difficult works. Ricoeur evidently is also at home in the thicket of the finearts, poetry, and even photography. Still, his practical criticism has been confined tofairly predictable readings of Proust, Thomas Mann, and Virginia Woolf in volume 2 ofTime and Narrative, choosing novels that thematize his theses. His discussion of paintersremains abstract. He pays homage to Czanne and van Gogh as men driven to repaysome vague debt when after countless tortured attempts they come to rest on a singularsolution to some singular knot of issues that only their paintings allow them toexperience [Ricoeur, Azouvi, and Launay 178]. Deleuze and Ricoeur acknowledge thatart achieves universality when it is most particular, so particular that no language, andcertainly no philosophy, could restate what it has made intelligible.

    Although he is personally drawn to nonfigurative painting and to twelve-tone music,Ricoeurs main discussion of art relates to narrative, where questions of identity andrepresentation are central. His attitude toward representation would seem to sunder himfrom Deleuze at the outset, for Deleuze has done more than anyone to dethrone itsstatus in philosophy. The very word representation acknowledges a prior and deeperreality that exacts debts of fealty from the human all-too-human. Representation curbscreativity in favor of knowledge and position; it provides a fundamentally spatial model

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    rather than an evolving, temporal one. Deleuzes critique updates that of Bergson and ofphenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty who are concerned with process and emergenceover clarity and the certain recognition of states of affairs.

    Ricoeur, on the other hand, has welcomed representation precisely because itinevitably introduces what he takes to be the inescapability of position. He is amongthose for whom (French) philosophy fell into its original sin, egology, having beentempted by the snake of consciousness which held out the apple, seemingly natural andhealthy, of direct reflection on transpersonal problems. But reflection is never simple.As soon as a representation is engaged, the point of reflection of phenomenologybecomes merely point-of-view, which Husserl hoped to neutralize via the second(eidetic) reduction. Ricoeur, after finding an eidetic approach unsatisfactory in his firstvolume of Philosophy of the Will [Ricoeur xiv], accepted perspective as inevitable andadvocates a hermeneutics wherein perspectives can be multiplied, crossed over, andopposed in the midst of a cultural world whose horizons shift with history. Representationsserve as heuristics for knowledge and action. Some representations extend thought beyondtheir apparent content to life itself. And representations always work by extension.Metaphors and narratives, whether fictional or historical, are representations aroundand through which thought emerges. They form stepping stonesor, why not, plateausin a trajectory of understanding that circles past the aporias that inevitably open up infront of direct reflection. Here Ricoeur crosses paths with Deleuze who likewise woulddislocate the path of thought by means of the intercessors he loves to introduce fromfar afield [Deleuze, Mediators].

    Hegelian in spite of himself, Paul Ricoeurs plateaus are fewer in number thanthose of Deleuze and Guattari. When asked about the scope of philosophy by the son ofhis friend, Esprit editor Jean-Marie Domenach, Ricoeur aphorized: Listen young man,philosophy is really very simple. There are only two problems: the one and the multipleand the same and the other [Dosse, PR 270]. But philosophy has a history, becausethese insoluble problems are always raised in discursive situations that themselves requirestudy. Hermeneutics, it turns out, amounts to the careful, indebted exploration of suchsituations, striving to understandthat is, to recover and uncoverwhat must ever liebeyond the particular moments and motives of our questioning and answering.Unsurprisingly, history and fiction are the landscapes from whose most prominentplateaus Ricoeurs hermeneutics takes flight. Philosophy is indebted to, and at the serviceof, these textual practices by which the imagination strives to bring coherence and theillusion of permanence to ceaseless change.

    This discourse of debt with which Ricoeur justified the irreplaceable value of bothhistory and fiction may have come from Emmanuel Levinas, with whom he interactedintensely after 1980 [Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3: 12425]. Lurking beneath hisdiscussion of traces, cadavers, and forgetfulness is unquestionably the Shoah, unavoidablein France in this period. Ricoeurs Protestantism, sensitive to the coupled terms debitand debt, is able to respond positively by invoking the notions of credit andcredibility. He even seems to emphasize the economic connotation behind a favoritephrase: Someone counts on me [Breuil]. For as he makes clear in a 1991 televisioninterview in the series Presence Protestante, every promise derives from, contributesto, and puts at risk the vulnerability of self, of other, and of language [Marquette]. If Ibreak a promise, I make a mockery of the self I pretended to be, I disrespect whomevermy broken word injures, and I damage language, the chief institution and medium throughwhich human beings extend themselves beyond the here and now. Language stabilizesstates of affairs only if its propositions are believed to apply beyond the moment of theirutterance. This is as true, Ricoeur might argue, for deconstructive philosophy as formarriage vows; both assume a debt to the institution of language which makes whatthey state meaningful, and persistently so.

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    Deleuze has no patience with debts or promises, and certainly not with a balancesheet of debits and credits. He would unmoor philosophy from language altogether anddestabilize the subject so as to release new energies and concepts that have been held incheck by the repressive self. Nietzschean, he demands the overthrow of common senseand common language on behalf of a living power which runs through and beyond theself and which the self can help release by letting go of self-consistency. Hence thepremium he placed on schizophrenia, nomadism, and the false, all of which accumulateand release power only by upsetting every institution that ties life to predictability andsameness.

    If he had it in him to be snide, Ricoeur would surely ridicule in Deleuze a Continentaltendency to address problems as if from scratch. Extreme positions play their role inRicoeurs thought too, but it is a heuristic role; they serve as guides to thought, barriersagainst which thought must rebound in its career toward the true and the right. Extremistssuccumb to the hubris of believing themselves at the source of whatever is valuable inphilosophy, ready to jettison most or all other views from the outset. Ricoeur insteadmodestly believes he has stepped into a world already made meaningful by earlier thought.Indeed he believes we are born on a moving walkway of thought, heading in a directionnot of our own choosing [Breuil]. Agency comes into play first and mainly asreconnaissance, literally re-cognizing our heritage, and deciding what parts of it activelyto maintain. How then does one initiate a decisive action or submit to a conversion,when one is always already enmeshed in significance? The answer comes in the modeof a hermeneutics, a reinterpretation and present-day application of the already thought,the already written. Hermeneutic phenomenology amounts to a tactic of retreat, reflection,deflection, and redirection. Ricoeur sees himself more as a negotiator than an originatorof ideas; or rather, in the idiom of La mtaphore vive, his originality comes through asperspective. He allows utterly new meaning to open up through his adroit andsometimes brilliant maneuvering of concepts rather than through that pure creation ofconcepts (crer des concepts) by which Deleuze and Guattari define the genuinevocation of philosophy [11].

    This manner of thinking and of living is most fully articulated in the summary workof 1990, Ricoeurs masterpiece, Soi-mme comme un autre (Oneself as Another).Painstakingly, Ricoeur develops conceptions of the self deriving from both the English(analytic) and the German (ontological) traditions before recovering the narrativeself, the self as someone about whom a past and future can be recounted and projected.This in turn permits him to engage in an ethical discourse of self as agent in history.Retreat initiates, but cannot complete, an inquiry brought about by doubts concerningthe mysteries (Marcel) of identity and relationship. The books wonderful title isolatesin its three English words the chief targets of doubt and sources of faith that have orientedRicoeurs interactions from the beginning. Radical doubt has always been associatedwith a concern about the very existence and then the intelligibility or accessibility ofanother. Later, turned on oneself, skepticism grew into the enterprise ofpsychoanalysis. Finally, deconstruction has dismantled the seeming transparence of therelation between self and other, the innocent comme (as) that stands for language,whose stability and authority cannot be taken for granted.

    Oneself as Another stitches a brilliant new pattern from the unraveling cloth ofontology and epistemology. Once again, the inextinguishable force of imagination comesto rescue freedom from the dissolution of the human, this time by encouraging us toclaim a certain identity (via the privileged term attestation) even if our bodies havemutated and our circumstances, beliefs, and friends have changed. We narrate suchchanges and become the character of our own story, and we do so in a field of otherswith whom we literally share the plot of history. And so Ricoeurs philosophy, which

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    floats on the shifting seas of interpretation, finds its harbor not in ontology orepistemology, but rather in aesthetics and ethics, modes of behavior that we exerciseevery day and circumstantially.

    As he enters the new millennium, writingever writingRicoeur must find itappropriate to salute history and its twin mechanisms, memory and forgetting [Lammoire, lhistoire, loubli]. Forgetting belongs to his recent meditations on justice,particularly in regard to international and interracial violence. Forgetting allies itselfwith forgiving so as to permit a beginning which acknowledges the past but whichselectively applies the burden of heritage to the present. At the level of the person,Ricoeurs Oneself as Another took its title from Georges Bernanoss country priest,who wrote in his journal: Grace means forgetting oneself; it means loving oneselfhumbly, as one would any of the suffering members of Jesus Christ [Oneself as Another24]. Of course as soon as one chooses a particular suffering member to love (oneself,for example), obsessions may follow, so that one records every movement of the heartin a journal (Bernanos) or develops thousands of pages of philosophy to honor andunderstand what one loves, even humbly (Ricoeur). This is hardly forgetting oneself.

    Ricoeur is, therefore, far more devoted to memory [Breuil]. Where Heidegger refinedhis senses and his speculative powers to orient himself in a world into which he feltthrown, Ricoeur seems to have been born reading traces of meaning in a worldoverflowing with meaning. There is perhaps more Platonism in Ricoeur than has everbeen noted; for Plato, the soul recovers itself by remembering a primordial truth towhich it stands innately attached; for Ricoeur, the person becomes itself in re-cognizinga heritage given circumstantially at birth. History is the double movement first ofunderstanding that heritage by interrogating its traces and second of moving forwardfrom this particular stance to a future that affects a world made up of ones contemporariesand successors. History (personal and collective memory, assiduously uncovered,interpreted, and debated) provides a limited number of plateaus from which groups ofpersons (ones family, social circle, nation) can become oriented so as to move toward ahorizon. All this takes place in a climate of conflict, for access to the past and a vision ofthe future are strictly perspectival. And perspectives clash as we determine the existenceof the past (what is maintained in the collective memory and what is forgotten), debatethe meaning of that past, and negotiate a future that might maintain or break from thepast. But if one treats oneself as another, if one is open to metaphors and narratives thatshift perspectives, such clashes contribute to the ever-struggling community ofunderstanding. La mmoire, lhistoire, loubli appropriately crowns these interlockingspeculations about the representation of the past. What must surely be his ultimate projectstands at once as a professional epistemological disquisition about the nature of historicalknowledge, a rather phenomenological meditation on aging and memory, and a paternalreflection on the civic responsibilities at work in commemoration, forgiving andforgetting.

    Dosse writes a triumphal biography in chronicling Ricoeurs rise to what seems anultimate plateau of wisdom. Consecrated as the philosophe de la Cit, Ricoeur hasachieved the right and the responsibility to declaim magisterially on topics as immenseas justice and history. Characteristically, however, he refuses to adopt the confidentposture he might be thought to have earned. He has turned to the topic of memory notonly because he now carries within him so many decades of his own memories, norbecause he rues the inevitable erosion of this faculty as he ages, but because memorycan be seen as the precondition and the mechanism of both identity and history, alwayshis major concerns.

    The remorse he recently expressed at having neglected Bergson all these years issymptomatic of a full-fledged self-critique: Ricoeur believes he too quickly linked time

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    to narrative and narrative to history, creating a short-circuit of discourse that bypassedthe life of identity altogether. Beneath all the propositions and declarations of narrativeand history stands the glue of identity, the primary fastening, which is memory, andwhich involves the lyrical, non-narrative genres that express the self-constitution ofmemory in passive syntheses [Ricoeur, Azouvi, and Launay 9192]. Ricoeur musthave in mind something like Gabriel Marcels wonderful remarks on the integrity ofmelody, which he takes straight from Bergsons arguments in Matter and Memory[Marcel, Bergsonism and Music]. A melody (or a poem, in Augustines classicalformulation of the same problem in On Christian Doctrine) exists only as a whole eventhough it is given one sound at a time. And so, what of the integrity of the listener whointuits the whole thanks to the mechanism of primary memory, which holds togetherelements that go together? By extension the listener intuits his or her own coherence ofexistence. This occurs, Ricoeur now intimates, as a precondition for the narrativeidentity that he may have been too hasty to lay as the cornerstone of the self. Behindnarrative identity lie micromechanisms of memory. And from these grow the roots,trunks, branches, and flowers of our personal and social histories.

    In recognizing the dependence of culture on what are effectively neurologicalprocesses, Ricoeur may have put himself in dialogue with the brain scientists like Jean-Pierre Changeux [see Changeux and Ricoeur], but more enticing is the potentialrendezvous with Bergson and Deleuze. For Ricoeur needs memory to play a role similarto Geist in Husserl, that which links intentionality and the hyle of affect and sensation,and this brings him close to the entire Bergsonian problematic. Those, like myself, whohave followed Ricoeurs peregrinations over four decades, redirecting them wheneverpossible toward the arts (in my case, the cinema) must rejoice.

    Deleuze, Ricoeur, and the Image of Cinema

    From structuralism and psychoanalysis to theories of metaphor, narrative, and history,Ricoeurs timing has preternaturally anticipated the concerns of film theory. Yet he hashad nothing to say about this, the art form of the century. Now, however, having broachedthe obtuseness of the trace and zeroed in on the mechanism of memory, Ricoeurs thoughtmust at last traverse, or be conscripted to help organize, the field of the cinematic. Forthe cinema is precisely an apparatus of memory, safeguarding as well as manipulatingtraces of the past. It is also the most potent narrational force of our time and unparalleledin the formation of identities, those of stars and of spectators. Ricoeur may ignore thecinema, but his close readers should not.

    In a chapter entitled Figuration in Concepts in Film Theory [Andrew 16869], Irecruited Ricoeurs dynamic view of mtaphore vive to counter the more mechanicalstudy of cinematic tropes found in Christian Metzs Imaginary Signifier. I argued thatfigurationthe tracing or outlining of new contours of meaningcould occur at any ofwhat I still take to be the three key stages of cinematic signification: (a) the congealingof sensory stimuli into representations, (b) the organization of representations into arepresented world (narrative, descriptive, formal), and (c) the rhetorical or fictionalargument implied by that world. Given his own habits, Ricoeur ought to ratify the notionof stages in cinematic signification (particularly the idea that there should be three ofthem). The art of cinema he would surely lodge in the metaphoric figuration possibleat each stage but generally concentrated in one, depending on the mode or genre at play.That was the extent of my use of Ricoeur in 1984.

    Today, through him I would instead advance the role of memory from first to last inthe full arc of the experience of cinema. For only something like the primary fastening

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    allows photograms to cohere into shots in the first place, and shots to impress on us inpassive syntheses their nearly ineluctable coherence. Next, memory maintains therepresented elements in mind as their narrative or descriptive pattern emerges, and,finally, it allows us to compare that pattern to other structures of intelligibility, whethercommonly available ones (genre, auteur) or those whose source is mysterious or brand-new and must be sought out. In short, a phenomenology might describe thetransformation, via memory, of sensations of sight and sound produced by projectedfilm into time and narrative. These would then serve as a prelude to the fictions andhistories on the screen, which Ricoeur could undoubtedly address in his characteristichermeneutic mode.

    At a higher level of abstraction films provide experimental solutions to the twoproblems of philosophy Ricoeur deems fundamental: the one and the multiple, the selfand the other. The one and the multiple is endemic to a medium caught between theaura of originality and the mechanisms of reproduction, a medium where the worksindividuality is established against the background of genre, a medium through whicheach spectator senses a tension between self and other in the semi-darkness of the movietheater. As for the second fundamental problem, self is thematized in every fiction filmvia processes of identification and by strategies of the gaze, while the opacity of theindexthe photographic tracestands as other, particularly that most unavoidable indexof alterity, the human face in close-up on the screen.

    The particular emphasis of each cinematic experiment, the stage where itsfiguration expands into new territoryin short, the difference it aims to make and thesameness it perpetuatessuggests a typology of modes, periods, genres, and styles. Itwas to parse this rich field of cinematic experimentation that Deleuze elaborated thebaroque network of categories that comprises his two-volume study of the medium. Inhis spirit, we might venture that classical films develop equilibrium between the oneand the multiple (through rhyming, redundancy, and repetition) and between self andother. Postmodern films, as ahistorical amalgams of styles, may dissolve the questionof identity through digitalization and often conflate the self and the other in an orgy ofcitation and simulation, whether in the key of nostalgia or of parody. Ricoeur feels mostat home between these extremes, responding to artworks produced in the mode ofmodernism. And it is modernist cinema that fills the corpus Deleuze examines in hissecond volume, beginning with Italian neorealism, where the disequilibrium of self andother is resolved most often in favor of the other, the trace that dramatically derailsevery effort to appropriate it. Where Ricoeur sanctions the work of the imagination inboth fiction and history as it struggles with and against the traces of a broken world,Deleuze celebrates the fertility of a cinema freed from the anchor of a false equivalencebetween the actual and the mental. The time-image grows out of the inability of thesubject to come into phase with a post-Holocaust, postatomic-bomb social and physicallandscape. And it grows willy-nilly in a cinemascape where the virtual and the actualare, to use the famous term he took from Leibniz, incompossible [Flaxman 57].

    But Deleuzes exciting formulation risks dropping off the discursive table on theextreme edge of which it characteristically teeters. So concerned with the utterly new,with the incompossible, he has tempted his followers to treat history cavalierly, merelyto engender any difference whatever. This at least is the danger that makes me turn toRicoeurs putative project in film studies and, taking a cue from his method, hold openboth the mediation of his essentially hermeneutic mediation and Deleuzes insistenceon radical creativity. Between these poles films may be most fertilely viewed and valued.

    To turn Ricoeurs mediation into an extreme may seem contrary until one listens tothe messianic openness of his program. He would vivify the future by revivifyingrepresentations (strong films, in our example) that have given us our sense of the present.

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    At the antipode of Deleuzes Powers of the False, then, stands Ricoeurs Powers ofthe Trace. These two comprise the fundamental properties of the cinematic. If Deleuzehas emphasized fabulation and virtual, Ricoeur is known as le fidle avec sammoire.

    Since fidelity and memory should attend an art form based on The Ontology of thePhotographic Image (the title of the great essay with which Andr Bazin launchedmodern film theory in 1945), one can imagine, in the place of Ricoeur, Bazin offeringDeleuze encouragement and caution. Encouragement would come from Bazinsfascination with geology, botany, and other natural processes whose traces on film canlead to effects he was ready to call surrealist and fantastic. Well before Deleuze,Bazin understood cinematic fabulation to profit from its partly inhuman source. But heargued that it should remain true to that source, and so would surely have cautionedDeleuzians intoxicated by the nonorganic infinity of the digital. When the virtual attainsparity with the actual, cinema writes off its debt to the trace; then, floating unanchoredin a sea of images of its own devising, cinema will have abandoned its historical impulse.Heretofore, all films have documented reality; as Godard said, echoing Bazin, the mostfantastical fiction registers the faces of actors literally traced on celluloid at such andsuch a time. Cinema, the art of the modern era best theorized by Bazin, yokes historyand fiction. Similarly, Ricoeur brilliantly argued in 1985 that the debt felt by the historian(to traces left in the archive) corresponds to the debt felt by the fabulator (to the ideawhose insistence, if not whose truth, disciplines the process of creation and causes suchagony when the results are just not right) [Time and Narrative 3: 192]. The cinema isthe site par excellence both of such debts and of their commingling. The postwarmodernity of the art form, agree Giorgio de Vincenti [1124] and Dominique Pani,arises from its simultaneous gains in photographic realism (natural light, locationshooting, and so forth) and fictional experimentation (unreliable narrators, indiscernibilityof dreams and flashbacks).

    Deleuzes tastes and notions respond to these special powers of the medium and theparticular power of films just emerging in the wake of World War II, those that introducedbifurcated time. In his second volume, Deleuze proclaimed the absolute novelty ofRenoirs Le rgle du jeu, of Welless Lady from Shanghai, of Neorealism and the NewWave. Such films open onto everything interesting in the modern cinema. Deleuze drewon Bazins prescience in this, for it was Bazin who, we have already noted, first tookWelles seriously, Bazin who brought Rossellini to Paris for the astounding premiere ofPaisa