Ideology and Utopia in the Constitution of the Intersubjective Bond and Collective Identity

MARÍA BEATRIZ DELPECH

Los Angeles

Conferencia; 12th Annual Society for Ricoeur Studies Conference; 2018

The Society for Ricoeur Studies

This presentation aims to answer Jeffrey Barash?s critical reflection on Paul Ricoeur?s understanding of the intersubjective bond and the constitution of collective memory and identity, based on the reading of Lectures on Ideology and Utopia and some related essays written during that same period (1975). As Ricoeur defines them, ideology and utopia are two expression of cultural imagination. His 1976 article ?Idéologie et utopie: deux expression de l?imaginaire social » is an inventory of considerations that Ricoeur sought to integrate to his theory as a result of his reading of the young Marx and his rejection of the structuralist interpretation of his theory of ideology. In Marx, he tracked down a fundamental notion of ideology and a concept of praxis that included among its structural elements a symbolic mediation. This research set the grounds for the triple mimesis theory that would become central to his philosophy the last thirty years of his life. Not only does he seek to justify his conception on the symbolic element of action but, moreover, through his inquiry on the fundamental functions of ideology and utopia, Ricoeur develops both a process and a dimension in which intersubjectivity, collective identity and collective memory can be conceived. These subjects would become the object of his research especially in Soi-même comme un autre, La mémoire, l?histoire, l?oublie and Parcours de la reconnaissance. In many occasions, however, we find in Ricoeur?s work a leap between the individual and the collective sphere which, in most cases, appears to be not sufficiently justified. In Soi-même comme un autre, the French philosopher allows himself to proceed from one level of analysis to the other without further considerations on the construction of the intersubjective bond and the ontological status of collective identities. In La mémoire, l?histoire, l?oublie, when examining memory, he takes Husserl?s concept of analogy to justify the relationship between the self and the other and to open the possibility of memory attribution to the first person plural, that is to say, to a collective ?we.? In any case, the leap between the individual and the collective remains unclear and it raises more questions than it can possibly answer.The critical reflection of J. Barash, in many of his papers but mainly in his last book Collective Memory and the Historical Past, points out that very imprecision and its challenges. Barash believes that Ricoeur lacks a proper theory of the symbol, which could account for the complex levels of mediation between the personal experience and memory and the collective domain. But Barash´s critical reflections are grounded mainly in ?besides La mémoire, l?histoire, l?oublie- De l?interptrétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud, from 1965, and Temps et récit, from 1983-85. We believe, however, that we might find the answers to Barash?s objection in the 1975 Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, where Ricoeur outlines a theory of the social imagination that is developed on the grounds of the tension between two functions that imply symbolic mediation, and that does not reduce the unique aspects of communal existence to uniform models of psychic explanation.