The Ethics of Love as Translation of History and Finitude: An Essay from Paul Ricoeur
Abstract
Could an ethical reasoning give an answer to the crisis of historicity ? The scope of the present article is to address the question of ethics along with Paul Ricœur, by analyzing the relation between love and justice and by drawing a parallel between this relation and the way in which Jacques Derrida defines translation. Through the Ricœurien description of love as Christian love of enemies and through the description of justice as distributive justice, we show that love corresponds to an anhistorical dimension, which transgresses our facticity, while justice belongs to facticity, finitude and historicity. Their conflict is overcome by Ricœur, who shows that the two are reciprocally dependent. Their relation is nonetheless marked by an asymmetry which does not allows us to consider it as a mere dialectic. Along with Jacques Derrida, we may conceive this relation as a translation and we may thus hermeneutically reconsider the nature of translation itself. This approach sheds a new light both on the Ricœurien relation between love and justice and on the question of historicity.
Downloads
References
Derrida, J. (2005). Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction relevante ?. Paris: Éditions de l’Herne.
Heidegger, M. (1967). Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Landheer-Cieslak, C. (2012). Paul Ricœur et l’éthique du jugement judiciaire : Quelles relations entre justice et sollicitude?. Revue interdisciplinaire d’études juridiques, 2012/1 (Volume 68), 1–47.
Mauss, M. (1923 – 1924). Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques. L’Année sociologique, Nouvelle Série, 1ère Année (1923 – 1924), 30–186.
Ricœur, P. (1994a). Entre philosophie et théologie I : la Règle d’Or en question. Dans Paul Ricœur, Lectures. Tome 3 : Aux frontières de la philosophie. Paris: Seuil, 273–279.
Ricœur, P. (1994b). Phénoménologie de la religion. Dans Paul Ricœur, Lectures. Tome 3: Aux frontières de la philosophie. Paris: Seuil, 263–271.
Ricœur, P. (2000). La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris: Seuil.
Ricœur, P. (2004). Sur la traduction. Paris: Bayard.
Ricœur, P. (2005). Le juste, la justice et son échec. Paris: Éditions de l’Herne.
Ricœur, P. (2008). Amour et justice. Paris: Éditions Points.
Ricœur, P. (2013). D’un Testament à l’autre: essai d’herméneutique biblique. Dans Paul Ricœur, Cinq études herméneutiques. Genève: Éditions Labor et Fides, 115–130.
Schürmann, R. (2013). Le principe d’anarchie. Heidegger et la question de l’agir. Paris: Diaphanes.
Thomasset, A. (1996). Paul Ricœur. Une poétique de la morale. Aux fondements d’une éthique herméneutique et narrative dans une perspective chrétienne. Leuven: Peeters.
Copyrights for articles published in Critical Hermeneutics are retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal.
Critical Hermeneutics is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence CC BY 3.0
. With the licence CC-BY, authors retain the copyright, allowing anyone to download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute and/or copy the contribution (edited version), on condition that credit is properly attributed to its author and that Critical Hermeneutics is mentioned as its first venue of publication.
