The Recalcitrant Distentio of Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative
Time and Narrative delineates a line of inquiry that begins with Ricoeur’s (re)formulation in Part I of Aristotelian muthos, towards his subsequent renegotiation of the problem of eternity and temporality that pivots on the opposed conceptions of time in Kant and Husserl. This outline of the project...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Published: |
Oxford University Press
2013
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| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2013, Volume: 27, Issue: 2, Pages: 170-182 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Time and Narrative delineates a line of inquiry that begins with Ricoeur’s (re)formulation in Part I of Aristotelian muthos, towards his subsequent renegotiation of the problem of eternity and temporality that pivots on the opposed conceptions of time in Kant and Husserl. This outline of the project’s philosophical trajectory is useful and accurate, but also crucially partial because it underestimates the role played throughout the project by Augustine’s Confessions. Set at the outset by Ricoeur in explicit dialectic with the Poetics, Ricouer’s emphasis on time’s evanescence is crystallised in his valorisation of the Augustinian distentio. In Part I the distentio serves as the ongoing phenomenological counterpart to the Aristotelian triad of beginning, middle, and end, and is understood to inform the resultant formulation of a threefold mimesis. The distentio comes subsequently to assume an independent life in the text: rather than subsumed to the philosophical debate about time, it returns to condition every formulation and reformulation of it in Sections II–IV of Time and Narrative. This article begins by rehearsing Ricoeur’s reading of the Confessions to underscore his (admittedly controversial) refusal to endorse a reading that resolves the human distentio in divine extentio. It then traces the consequence of this for Ricoeur’s formulations first of the threefold mimesis, and then in recurrent form of the relation of fictive and historical narration. The distentio, I argue, is best understood as ‘recalcitrant’—necessarily resistant to encompassing formulation—because Ricoeur sees it as essential to his reformulation, announced at the end of Section I, of the Heideggerian problem of ‘being-toward-death’ as the concurrent experience of death as final, and as that beyond which we are nonetheless able to think. Such a conception requires an ontological predicate of time that is itself beyond narrative—even as narrative proves essential to its expression. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frt007 |