David Leichter

This paper explores some implications of Ricoeur’s conception of testimony. Testimony plays two roles: it enables us to know what actually happened and it reveals how the past continues to be meaningful. However, these two roles generate a peculiar problem: the meaning of the past, as bearing witness, cannot be exhausted by a narrative account of what happened. Furthermore, since testimony situates a people within a tradition and raises suspicion on such a narrative by showing that it does not fully bear witness to the past, Ricoeur’s understanding of testimony opens a site for ethical and political challenges.

The turn to narrative in biomedicine has been one of the most important alternatives to traditional approaches to bioethics. Rather than using ethical theories and principles to guide behavior, narrative ethics uses the moral imagination to cultivate and expand one’s capacities for empathy. This paper argues that by themselves narratives do not, and cannot, fully capture the range of the illness experience. But more than that, the emphasis on narrative often obscures how dominant forms of narrative discourse often operate to marginalize those whose narratives fall outside the parameters of traditional narrative forms or whose stories are occluded by structural violence and oppression. Rather, by focusing on forms of embodiment that are irreducible to narrative discursivity, this paper highlights forms of selfhood that exist outside of the narrative self.

This paper examines how eating illuminates the operations of memory, on one hand, and how practices of memory sheds light on the ways that our material food practices are imbued with meaning. In order to do so, I develop some ideas from Jennifer Jordan’s recent book Edible Memory. In that work, she identifies the ways that eating food is a deeply personal experience, but one that shapes and is shaped by our social and material world. Edible memory, in other words, describes processes through which historical meaning is transmitted and how it is received and incorporated into one’s life. While developing Jordan’s analysis of edible memory, I also want to trouble it by suggesting another dimension of memory that remains under-theorized in her account. In particular, while edible memory can be seen in a variety of mnemonic practices surrounding food, Jordan’s account underplays the relationality of memory and how memory operates to co-constitute identities. As such, her account needs to be further supplemented with a description of the ways that forgetting and appropriating culinary traditions can marginalize others’ identities. By providing an account of this, I show how edible memory is implicated in, and framed by, relations of power, and how it can nevertheless operate as a site of mnemonic resistance that can challenge oppressive culinary practices.

Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind addresses how the unequal distribution of economic, cultural, and political power along socioeconomic and racial lines affects civic engagement and democratic participation. In order to address this gap, Levinson develops a critical pedagogy that encourages teachers and students to recognize the ways that identity and ideology are intertwined. After briefly reviewing some of the considerations that frame her book, I suggest that her account of an engaged civic pedagogy could be further strengthened by considering how non-traditional forms of protest make possible new forms of solidarity.

Collective memory has been a notoriously difficult concept to define. I appeal to Paul Ricoeur and argue that his account of the relationship of the self and her community can clarify the meaning of collective memory. While memory properly understood belongs, in each case, to individuals, such memory exists and is shaped by a relationship with others. Furthermore, because individuals are constituted over a span of time and through intersubjective associations, the notion of collective memory ought to be understood in terms of the way that memory enacts and reenacts networks of relations among individuals and the communities to which they belong, rather than in terms of a model that reifies either individuals or groups. Ricoeur’s account can show sources of oppression and offers ways to respond to them

In this dissertation, I explore the significance of remembering, especially in its communal form, and its relationship to narrative identity by examining the practices that make possible the formation and transmission of a heritage. To explore this issue I use Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur, who have dedicated several of their major works to remembrance and forgetting. In comparing Heidegger and Ricoeur, I suggest that Ricoeur's formulation of the identity of a subject and a community offers an alternative to Heidegger's account. For, if Heidegger's critique of subjectivity offers the possibility of a new relationship to history and community, it nevertheless overlooks the possibility of a humanism that is not tied to a metaphysical account of subjectivity. By contrast, the positive work of remembrance can recover heretofore concealed possibilities through our being faithful to the past, and saving it from the destructive forces of time. To show how the fragility of memory preserves the past against the destructive work of time and brings with it the hope of a better future, I emphasize one specific theme--namely, the debt we owe to the dead, which dissertations the possibility for ethical consideration of an historical community. In this regard, this dissertation pursues two goals. The first task is to elucidate how Heidegger's and Ricoeur's phenomenological projects understand the intimate connection between remembrance and the creation of a community. The second goal of this dissertation is to show how Ricoeur is able to respond to the problems that Heidegger's ontological account of memory raises. The completion of these two tasks will contribute to a phenomenological hermeneutics of memory and forgetting