Annalisa Caputo

In Ricoeur’s last works, we can find what he calls a poetics of love. Choosing the “dialectic” path of a comparison between love and justice, Ricoeur claims that justice lies in the rule of equivalence (give to each his own); the disorientation of love, instead, suspends the return, the equivalence, the exchange. Love does not say: “do ut des”, but rather (if we can transform the expression) it says “do ut dem”, to offer without expecting anything in return: this is what Ricoeur calls a “first gift”. However, it is an expectation that is always open to the possibility of a “surprise”: the surprise of a “second first gift” able to fulfill the gratuity of the original act of donation. This essay questions this possibility of “mutual gift”.

Starting from the Préface written by Paul Ricoeur for the text L’amore difficile (Jervolino, 1995), this paper reconstructs the dialogue woven by the two thinkers on this issue, underlining the (methodological and hermeneutical) convergences, but also the inevitable divergences. A philosophical hermeneutics in which philosophy includes itself and its other (i. e. biblical thought): «this hermeneutics, in my opinion, remains to be thought» – Ricoeur notes. Can we maybe say that this hermeneutic of the ‘difficult love’ has been written by Domenico Jervolino, in a way that, after all, is – compared to his 'mentor' – the same one and an other one?

One of Ricoeur’s legacies is the expression “school of suspicion”, indicating Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. However, this formula was not “invented” by Ricoeur, but by Nietzsche. This is an oddity. Indeed, Ricoeur never worked monographically on Nietzsche, although in his work the French philosopher disseminated precious insights on the German thinker. Hence the questions: is it possible to speak of a Ricoeurian interpretation of Nietzsche? What is its specificity? This essay will present both the published texts, and the Courses in which references to the German thinker appear. And it will show that what unifies this path is precisely the logic of suspicion, reconsidered through the phenomenological topos of “reduction”: reduction of the illusions of consciousness, tropological reduction, and genealogical reduction. This also tells us that, according to Ricoeur, suspicion is never only deconstructive criticism, but is always also archaeological deciphering and a proposal for liberation.

This article is divided into two parts. In the first one, we will ask what place Ricœur reserves for art works within his philosophical path. We will try to show how this issue is only apparently minor and unimportant. In fact, the language of figurative art, totally other than the conceptual/argumentative language of the logos, is that which more than any other experience can allow philosophy to reflect on otherness, and to discover ‘itself as another.’ In the second part, starting with this acquisition, we will ask ourselves what constitutes the singularity of artistic language and the particular communication specific to works of art. This will allow us to circle back to the initial question and ask ourselves, therefore, what figurative language can teach philosophical communication and what the arts can offer philosophy.

Most scholars point out that Ricœur’s itinerary ends with a “phenomenology of the capable human being”. In this paper, I will try to propose a different hypothesis and explain why Ricœur’s last writings can be considered the starting point of a second Copernican revolution within phenomenology. A revolution of both method (from the analytic to the a-logical) and contents (from the theme of intersubjectivity to the theme of “giving” and loving), which, already in the Preface of Le volontaire et l’involontaire, Ricœur wished could follow after the first revolution of the reflexive phenomenology: a hermeneutic poetic phenomenology that develops the project that the early Ricœur had drafted, but not completed in the 1950s. This is the project of a Poetics of the Gift, in which is hidden, in my opinion, the fecundity of Ricœurian philosophy and the possibility for it to become paradigmatic for the philosophy to come.