Paul Ricœur: Raconter, se souvenir et oublier

Abstract

This excerpt by Bernhard Waldenfels is from the second part of his book, Sociality and Otherness – Modes of Social Experience (Sozialität und Alterität – Modi sozialer Erfahrung (Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2015), 363-85), where he tests and further pursues his theory of responsiveness through a series of debates with Husserl, Schütz and Gurwitsch, Searle, Castoriadis, Foucault, and Ricœur. In his discussion of the latter’s work, he focuses on the themes of memory and forgetting, primarily in Time and Narrative and Memory, History, Forgetting. The text is divided into four sections. In the first two, Waldenfels revisits Ricœur’s arguments which he insists did not sufficiently attend to the importance of forgetting in narratives. In the last two, the author proposes a revision of the Ricœurian philosophy of forgetting under the heading of a responsive phenomenology. Both with and against Ricœur, Waldenfels considers forgetting as a pathos that forces us to respond.