A Return On The Repressed: The Debt of History in Paul Ricoeur’s Time And Narrative

Abstract

In third volume of Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur introduces concept of as a means of formulating historian's and novelist's ethical relationship to past. Although idea of plays a relatively small role within context of Ricoeur's lengthy study, its role is an intriguing one. Its introduction marks a moment in which Ricoeur's analytical is disrupted by a paradoxical metaphor implicit in concept of debt. Debt produces an anxiety that expresses itself in oppositional tension between ethical demand makes of practices of historiography and fiction and structural impossibility of fulfilling this demand. In this essay, I will trace term debt from its introduction into Ricoeur's discussion through various applications that Ricoeur makes of it. In course of this tracing, I will identify characteristics that accrue to term as it moves from its seemingly unproblematic invocation to Ricoeur's resolution of term as fundamentally mysterious (156). These characteristics will lead me to suggest a similarity between structure of as it moves towards mysteriousness and structure of obsessional neurosis. In light of this similarity, Ricoeur's appears as a symptom of repression and, as such, dialectizes individuality and institutionality. An argument made by Ricoeur in earlier work guides my approach in this essay. In The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur argues for need to distinguish between literal and metaphoric senses of a word in philosophical discourse. This distinction should act as a limit to what he sees as a deconstructionist methodology, an analysis that Ricoeur depicts as a positing of an originary literalness prior to term's linguistic metaphorization. Such a methodology claims to reveal a metaphysics that underpins philosophical under analysis. Ricoeur argues that such a distinction bears little critical import and exists only through conflict of two interpretations. One interpretation employs only values that are already lexicalized and so succumbs to semantic impertinence; other, instituting a new semantic pertinence, requires a twist in word that displaces its own meaning. In this way, a better semantic analysis of metaphorical process suffices to dispel mystique of proper, without any need for metaphoricity to succumb along with it. (29091)1 Ricoeur, however, also argues, in his essay, Metaphor and Problem of Hermeneutics, necessity of a twofold explication of a metaphor's meaning and function within a text. This explication proceeds first from an explanation of metaphor's function within the immanent pattern of discourse of its context (171). The approach's second move develops aspect of meaning which we have called reference, that is, intentional orientation towards a world (171). In this essay, I will attempt to proceed along these lines, although in inverse order. I will trace way in which functions as a concept in context of Ricoeur's theorization of narrative. I will then highlight debt's metaphoric value and related tension produced in text. I will not, again following Ricoeur, argue for an original and primary sense or etymological development of metaphor of debt, however. By adopting this methodology, I am attempting to dialectize potentiality of a tradition of in its lexical use and anxiety that surrounds its metaphorical use. In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur first introduces idea of in relation to practice of writing of history. He argues that notion of a past that actually existed is supported by an implicit ontology, in virtue of which historian's constructions have ambition of being reconstructions, more or less fitting with what one day was real. Everything takes place as though historians knew themselves to be bound by a to people from earlier times, to dead. …