Space And Narrative—Enrique Dussel And Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

This essay aims to follow up on a missed encounter. In The Underside of Modernity Enrique Dussel and Paul Ricoeur engage in what is almost a dialogue.1 Although Dussel is thankful for the instruction that he has received from Ricoeur while his student, he makes it clear that he finds Ricoeur's work to exhibit a certain Eurocentrism, since Ricoeur fails to consider the role of in his numerous projects, including his accounts of personal identity and ethics. Space, Dussel insists, is crucial for these projects, since the irrationality of capitalism is suffered precisely by those on the periphery of its functioning, such as those living in South America or Africa. Ricoeur provides two principal responses. First, that it simply is not possible any longer to proceed as if the Marxist analysis of economics is wholly correct. And second, that Europeans must address their own forms of catastrophic racism in Europe first; namely, the Shoah. One can already see where the two thinkers miscommunicated. For Ricoeur, Dussel's concern with is reducible to his Marxist economic commitments. For Dussel, Ricoeur's concern with the Shoah marks a failure to recognize how European colonization is directly responsible for the legacy of underdeveloped nations. The point at issue, namely, the meaning of space, is never clarified and so a dialogue never actually occurs. What might have come about had these two thinkers been able to engage in dialogue more adequately? One fruitful way to follow this possibility is to bring what Dussel sees unaddressed in Ricoeur's work, namely, space, to what is one of Ricoeur's greatest achievements, namely, his account of narrative. The choice of this possibility is not arbitrary. For Dussel, Ricoeur's work on time and narrative is just one instance in the legacy of Eurocentrism that devalues in favor of time as the principal topic for determining personal identity. What is left out of Dussel's account, however, is how such a world of longitudes and latitudes connects with the human of lived existence. Ricoeur's work on narrative addresses precisely how the domains of cosmic time and human time can be coordinated. So it would be not altogether surprising to find that if extended to space, narrative could provide a similar poetic solution to the rift present in Dussel's work. A similar need can be found in Ricoeur's work. He begins the first volume of Time and Narrative by noting how plot synthesizes logical much the same way metaphor does, and ends volume three with a discussion of the space of experience in relation to the horizon of expectation as a transcendental of historical consciousness.2 Further, in his introductory comments to Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation, Ricoeur makes explicitly clear that he understands and especially an account of dwelling to be a crucial but unaddressed complement to his own project.3 To bring Ricoeur's work together with Dussel's in this way, then, would thematize and elaborate a motif that remains largely latent in Ricoeur's work, in addition to opening a dialogue, one that was almost opened, on the significance of the relation between and narrative for world poverty and race relations. Clearly, it will not be possible here to accomplish this whole project. Instead, we shall be concerned with accomplishing one central goal: establishing a preliminary schematic account of narrative space, much as Ricoeur provides in the third chapter of Time and Narrative. We shall begin with Dussel's account of space, since its somewhat elusive character served as the grounds for the initial missed encounter. Space, or the World System Let us state clearly just what Dussel means by space. It is part of what he calls the world-system.4 The world-system is a conditioned series of relations, which unequally distributes goods, services, human meaning, and existential possibility. The spatiality of this system concerns the inequality of the distribution, which establishes a center - for example, Europe and North America - and a periphery, which includes South America, Africa, India, and much of China, among other global regions. …