Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory (review)

This well-researched, clearly organized, and cogently argued study represents a remarkable scholarly achievement, not least because the book contributes importantly to at least four domains of inquiry at once: the history and theory of rhetoric, the history of philosophy (and in particular interactions among epistemology, hermeneutics, rhetoric, and poetics), twentieth-century intellectual history more broadly, and intellectual biography. Especially remarkable is how the author, having distilled from Ricoeur's oeuvre a constellation of ideas relevant to core issues of rhetoric, brings the philosopher's work into dialogue with classical rhetorical theory—to the mutual illumination of both bodies of discourse. As Ritivoi puts it in the introduction, drawing on Ricoeur's own concept of interpretive "distantiation": "by reading classical concepts through Ricoeur's lens I hope to create a critical vantage from which the scrutiny can yield more reliable results, while on the other hand by reading Ricoeur himself from the perspective of rhetorical theory I hope to create a vantage from which his concepts can be more thoroughly examined" (10). The result is a study that provides not only a metatheoretical account of the theoretical underpinnings of rhetorical inquiry, relevant for specialists interested in enriching the base of concepts on which current-day practice is grounded, but also an extraordinarily compact, useable primer on Ricoeur's philosophical concerns and methods. Indeed, given the voluminousness of Ricoeur's writings (helpfully assembled in a comprehensive, 9-page bibliography at the end of the book), readers in a variety of fields will benefit from Ritivoi's concise overview, which provides a sense of Ricoeur's larger philosophical project on its own terms—as well as an account of how that project might be used to recontextualize and revitalize the conceptual core of rhetoric as a discipline.

As Ritivoi notes, Ricoeur did publish two essay-length studies of rhetoric, and her introduction (1-25) draws on this work to sketch out Ricoeur's efforts to demarcate rhetoric from hermeneutics and poetics. But the bulk of Ritivoi's study concerns how work by Ricoeur not explicitly focused on rhetoric—in particular, his contributions to hermeneutics or interpretation theory—can nonetheless provide new foundations for rhetorical practice. The introduction relates Ricoeur to the larger tradition of hermeneutic inquiry that encompasses Schleimacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer (not to mention Habermas via his critique of Gadamer). Situating Ricoeur in this context allows Ritivoi to characterize the method used in her own study as a species of what Ricoeur himself termed critical hermeneutics, which seeks to come to terms with issues of authorial choice and strategic communication without however trafficking in the absolute intentionalism that seeks to fix upon determinate intentional states in the minds of authors. Instead, the aim is to explain writers' "beliefs and interests as socially, culturally, and politically situated responses" (13).

Accordingly, Ritivoi's first chapter—"The Vagrant Scholar" (27-47)—describes the sociocultural and educational experiences by which Ricoeur was shaped, building up a portrait of the environment in which he came to connect philosophical inquiry with reflection on matters of broad public concern. Key events include Ricoeur's exposure to German philosophy through his mentor Gabriel Marcel; his time as a prisoner of war in Pomerania (in northern Germany), in a camp where Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Mikel Dufrenne, and other intellectuals formed what became known as L'université de l'oflag (The University of the Prison Camp) (30); his teaching positions in philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, the Sorbonne (where Jacques Derrida served as his assistant), and Nanterre, where during the student protest of 1968 Ricoeur felt compelled to resign as dean; his subsequent appointment at the University of Chicago; and his publication of an extraordinary body of work that includes such landmark studies as The Conflict of Interpretations, Interpretation Theory, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, The Rule of Metaphor, The Just, From Text to Action, Onself as Another, and the three-volume masterwork, Time and Narrative. As Ritivoi notes, a number of conceptual motifs...