The Narrativizations of Time: Paul Ricoeur on Memory and History
摘要
Throughout his oeuvre, Ricoeur is concerned with the problematic of time, namely, how to think through the interrelation between its irreducibly cosmological and experiential aspects The paper addresses this problematic by showing how time as past, present and future, entails the entanglement of time and memory. The irreducibility of the experiential time of memory, uncovers further complications. These include the continuities and discontinuities between the time of memory and ‘historical time’. The paper focuses on this theme, by explicating how, for Ricoeur, the transition from the mnemonic to historical time becomes possible through the ‘historiographical operation’. The reflectivity inherent in the latter uncovers an enlarged conception of memory, encompassing collective memory and historicity. This sets up a hermeneutic circle between memory and history. In the first section, I discuss the historical framing of the problematic of time and memory, through Ricoeur’s analyses of the shifts in its articulation. This prepares the ground, in the second section, for a discussion of Ricoeur’s phenomenological typology of memory that lets the split between individual and ‘collective’ memory emerge. For Ricoeur, it is historiography that mediates this ‘split’. In the third section, I discuss the ‘connectors’ (reflective instruments) that mediate lived time and cosmological time, to contrast Ricoeur’s later, more processive approach, that allows for the transition from memory to historiography. The fourth section addresses this approach, via Ricoeur’s conception of ‘archived memory’, and uncovers the “dialectic between memory and history”.