En este estudio de gran envergadura, Paul Ricoeur toma como punto de partida la teoría de Karl Mannheim quien entendía los conceptos de ideología y utopía como íntimamente relacionados, pero definiéndolos como dos formas de desvío o incongruencia respecto a la realidad. Ricoeur contrapone a esta visión negativa una interpretación positiva, considerando que en ambos fenómenos hay también el factor positivo y hasta necesario de la construcción de discursos sobre la vida social real. Sólo si no se alejan demasiado de ésta pueden cumplir con su función positiva de elaboración simbólico-narrativa de lo real. Para Ricoeur, la conjunción de estas dos funciones opuestas tipifica la imaginación social y cultural. De este modo, el análisis de ideología y utopía forma parte de su proyecto más amplio de una filosofía de la imaginación que Ricoeur estaba elaborando al mismo tiempo. Los discursos, tanto ideológicos como utópicos, son los lugares en los que la sociedad deposita las respuestas a los cambios históricos y sociales. La investigación incluye un análisis detallado del concepto de ideología en Marx y muestra su evolución en las teorías de Max Weber, Louis Althusser, Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt y Clifford Geertz, entre otros. La vertiente de la utopía se atiende a lo largo del texto en interpretaciones novedosas de las obras renacentistas y modernas desde Tomás Moro hasta Fourier y otros utopistas representativos del siglo xix. Esta obra significa un paso decisivo hacia una hermenéutica de la sociedad, que anticipa las posiciones posteriores de Ricoeur en su teoría de la narratividad y de la historia.
Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century. In the course of his long career he wrote on a broad range of issues. His books include a multi-volume project on the philosophy of the will: Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950, Eng. tr. 1966), Fallible Man (1960, Eng. tr. 1967), and The Symbolism of Evil (1960, Eng. tr. 1970); a major study of Freud: Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965, Eng. tr. 1970); The Rule of Metaphor (1975, Eng. tr. 1977); Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (1976); the three-volume Time and Narrative (1983-85, Eng. tr. 1984–88); Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986); the published version of his Gifford lectures: Oneself as Another (1990, Eng. tr. 1992); Memory, History, Forgetting (2000, Eng. tr. 2004); and The Course of Recognition (2004, Eng. tr. 2005). In addition to his books, Ricoeur published more than 500 essays, many of which appear in collections in English: History and Truth (1955, Eng. tr. 1965); Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (1967); The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (1969, Eng. tr. 1974); Political and Social Essays (1974); Essays on Biblical Interpretation (1980); Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981); From Text to Action (1986, Eng. tr. 1991); Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (1995); The Just (1995, Eng. tr. 2000); On Translation (2004, Eng. tr. 2004); and Reflections on the Just (2001, Eng. tr. 2007).
The major theme that unites his writings is that of a philosophical anthropology. This anthropology, which Ricoeur came to call an anthropology of the “capable human being,” aims to give an account of the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities that human beings display in the activities that make up their lives. Though the accent is always on the possibility of understanding the self as an agent responsible for its actions, Ricoeur consistently rejects any claim that the self is immediately transparent to itself or fully master of itself. Self-knowledge only comes through our relation to the world and our life with and among others in that world.
In the course of developing his anthropology, Ricoeur made a major methodological shift. His writings prior to 1960 were in the tradition of existential phenomenology. But during the 1960s Ricoeur concluded that properly to study human reality he had to combine phenomenological description with hermeneutic interpretation. For this hermeneutic phenomenology, whatever is intelligible is accessible to us in and through language and all deployments of language call for interpretation. Accordingly, “there is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the final analysis self-understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms” (Oneself as Another, 15, translation corrected). This hermeneutic or linguistic turn did not require him to disavow the basic results of his earlier investigations. It did, however, lead him not only to revisit them but also to see more clearly their implications.
Transcription de cours. Pas une lecture vraiment chill, surtout pour la partie idéologie qui est looooongue quand on n'a pas hyper besoin de s'intéresser aux détails des discussions marxistes et post marxistes. En revanche je suis fan quand même pour la partie utopie et, sujet du cours, surtout, pour les liens entre les deux et l'approche qui croise philosophie, théorie de la littérature et littérature.
Compelling ideas to be sure, but the book was difficult to get through because it was so dense and Ricoeur continuously goes on tangents that make it difficult to connect a coherent line of thought through the chapters.
Especialmente relevantes el análisis final del concepto de tiempo y utopía, Habermas-Gadamer y el recorrido epistemológico de ideología (desde Marx a Geertz). Extraordinario
Troppo stupida e ormai dissidente accademica per poterci capire più dell'essenziale, ma questa rilettura (solo del capitolo su Clifford Geertz) mi ha dato ventordici spunti interessanti e mi ha lasciato intellettualmente sopraffatta (quasi quanto Barbie, fresco di visione).
Highlights: riflessioni sul concetto di ideologia, di ideologia come identità, sul «nemico di classe» come «vicino», e una serie di idee incasinate, in procinto di depositarsi in qualche angolo della mia mente, su: retorica, comunicazione, antropologia, metafore e semiologia.