Space of Experience, Horizon of Expectation. Spatiotemporal Metaphors, Philosophical Anthropology, and the Flesh

Paul Ricœur’s recourse to the metahistorical categories, space of experience and horizon of expectation, invites an inquiry into geography’s role as the guarantor of history. The ontology of the flesh provides the first indication of how one’s body is implicated in the sense of one’s place in the world. In turn, narrative inscriptions of events on the landscape transform the physical topography of a place into an array of sites where memories of ancestral wisdom and historical traumas endure. By anchoring historians’ representations of the past in the places and locales in which events took place, geography constructs a third space analogous to the third time of history. The aporias engendered by the phenomenology of time, however, have no equivalent in the phenomenology of space. The dissymmetry between the dialectic that informs the discourse of space and the one that informs the discourse of time thus keeps in place the reciprocal relation between geography and historiography.

From Ricœurian Hermeneutics to Environmental Hermeneutics. Space, Landscape, and Interpretation

The analysis of fundamental texts such as “Architecture and Narrativity” and Memory, History, Forgetting aims to fill a gap in studies of Environmental Hermeneutics. Indeed, the analogy between space and narrative, through parallelism with the process of triple mimesis, is usually deduced by environmental hermeneuticists from the works Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another. However, Ricœur himself took it upon himself to make this transposition in a direct and elaborated way from a phenomenological and hermeneutic analysis of the built space (through architecture) and the inhabited space, opening the way for a broader and more grounded epistemology of environmental hermeneutics. The introduction of the critical concept of landscape, as seen today by constructivist and cultural geography, legitimizes the claims of an environmental hermeneutics as an interpretive process of formally non-textual objects. Indeed, landscape in its connection to territory has its own semiotic and semantic character, which is appealed to for reading and interpretation.

Introduction – Ricœur and the Problem of Space. Perspectives on a Ricœurian “Spatial Turn”

Introduction to special issue "Ricoeur and the Problem of Space"

Le jeu est à l’espace ce que le récit est au temps. Une anthropologie ricœurienne du jeu comme mimèsis spatiale

By studying the logic that unites play, the rules of games and the body of players, this article intends to highlight a spatial mimesis through play and games. It consists of carrying out a Ricœurian anthropology of play and game, taking Ricœur's analysis of the relationship between time and narrative as a model. The article then shows that play prefigures the physical space as a lived space, that game configures a space of rules and that the player's body is refigured by the spatiality of the rules of the game. This application of the ternary model of Ricœurian mimesis thus allows a unified understanding of play and games by space, and of space by play and games.

La pensée des lieux de Paul Ricœur à l’épreuve du paysage. Un dialogue possible entre herméneutique, esthétique performative et phénoménologie

In this article, we argue that Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of spaces and the aesthetics vision of the landscape as a performance, based on the contemporary theories of Erika Fischer-Lichte, can integrate each other through the mediation of Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of the a priori. In particular, we will show how the representations and the hermeneutics of a landscape as a peculiar “text” are essentially connected with its the pre-reflective experience, which, being made possible by the activation of precise material – and therefore historical and cultural – a priori, can be thus translated into images and words. By intertwining hermeneutics, phenomenology, and performative esthetics we will provide with a non-reductive philosophical description of a landscape, i.e., a definition that does not neglect the aspects of it suggested by its linguistic pre-comprehension and artistic representations.

Telling the Story of Space. Between Design and Construction

Philosophy has always examined subjectivity in terms of its relationship with time, but less frequently has it engaged with the theme of space; however, as soon as it begins to do this, it runs into questions that remain very much open. Paul Ricoeur only moved onto considering the topic of space after having reflected at length on time and the temporality inhabited by subjectivity. Making space a topic means not only thinking about the extension of the one's own body as a lived body but also reflecting on that physical space in which "the other comes closer and where the close becomes other" and in which the encounter of identity and difference creates continuous short circuits, especially in the increasingly congested western metropolises. Starting from the "unexpected application" of the narrative dimension to architecture, Ricoeur goes on to develop an interesting reflection on space built and space inhabited.

Ernst Wolff, Lire Ricoeur depuis la périphérie (Bruxelles : Éditions de l’Université libre de Bruxelles, 2021)

Review of the book Ernst Wolff, Lire Ricoeur depuis la périphérie (Bruxelles : Éditions de l’Université libre de Bruxelles, 2021)

A Hermeneutic Introduction to Maps

The aim of this article is to show how a Ricœurian approach to space and place is likely to raise issues about geography and even cartography, rather than just ontological topology in a Heideggerian fashion. Two steps will lead towards that conclusion: the first concerns the role of Ricœur’s long détour in the transition from a transcendental—therefore empty—notion of place to the concrete plurality of places, which turns them into matters for interpretation; the second shows how the task of interpreting of places implies distanciation and even objectification, through which they are constituted as objects of scientific and critical investigation. Maps will be introduced at that point as specific interpretations of places, halfway between text and images, between the subject and the object, and between science and art.

John Arthos, Hermeneutics After Ricoeur (London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), pp. 252. $114.00 (hardback).

Review of the book John Arthos, Hermeneutics After Ricœur (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)

Thought and Political Judgment

Hannah Arendt’s claim that thinking is the last defense against the moral outrages of criminal political regimes sets the problematic of good and evil in relief. Human freedom, Paul Ricœur reminds us, is responsible for evil. The avowal of the evil of violence is thus the condition of our consciousness of the freedom to act anew.Aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics highlights our capacity to respond to exigencies in apposite ways. Exemplary representations of the good, the right, and the justexpress a desire for being. Eros is accordingly the law of every work, word, deed, or act that answers to a difficulty, challenge, or crisis. Bound to living experiences, thought attains its true height through interrogating, demystifying, and vacating frozen norms, standards, and mores. Judgment actualizes thought’s liberating effects in answer to the demands of the situations in which we find ourselves.