Ricoeur’s concept of testimony

ESTEBAN LYTHGOE

Analecta Hermeneutica

International Institute for Hemeneutics

Lugar: Toronto; Año: 2011

1918-7351

In this paper, I attempt to show the evolution of the concept of testimony in Paul Ricoeur’s writing. In the paper “Herméneutique du témoignage” at the Conference of Castelli in 1972 Ricoeur defined “testimony” in legal terms, as a testimony given in the frame of a dispute. In contrast, in La mémoire, l´ histoire, l’oublie split it from the legal frame and characterized testimony as a dialogical ‘natural institution’. My first hypothesis is that, even though in his conference of 1972 he recognized the legal origin of this concept, his definition is not quite a standard one. In order to establish this hypothesis, I will compare Ricoeur’s definition with C.A.J. Coady’s understanding of the term to show where the differences are and explore the implications of each. Next, I will discuss the limitations of the legal definition, and how the concept of testimony was changed in order to overcome them. I will then show how Ricoeur’s concept of testimony works in La mémoire, l´ histoire, l’oublie so as to associate memory with history. Finally, I will focus on Ricoeur’s revised notion of testimony in his last book Parcours de la reconnaissance, and argue that some of the changes in the definition had an argumentative and not a phenomenological reason.