A presentation copy, with a lengthy inscription by the author in blue ink to the half title: ‘Pour Maurice de Gandillac, Cher collègue et cher ami, je vous adresse ces essais qui jallonent une décade, dans l’espoir que l’un ou l’autre vous donnera envie de la prolonger ou de le pousser sur une autre voie, si nous nous rencontrons Paul Ricoeur’.
The recipient, Maurice de Gandillac (1906-2006), was Professor of History of the Middle Ages and Renaissance philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1946 to 1977, where he exercised considerable influence over the post-War generation of philosophers; indeed, his list of students reads almost as a ‘who’s who’ of post-structuralism, including Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Jean-François Lyotard, amongst others.
A collection of essays that variously orbit Ricoeur’s understanding of interpretation through hermeneutic phenomenology. Pushing back against structuralist claims to an objectivity that excludes the positionally of the inquiring subject or the inevitability of changes taking place for time, hermeneutics according to Ricoeur must be understood above all as the relationship between a self and its outside, a process with which it moves towards self-understanding. These essays explore, via this critique, how hermeneutics can account for the change of one structure into another as well how best to conceptualise the inevitable surplus of meaning that structuralism aims to systematise and eradicate. A key text in the ongoing intellectual debate provoked by the post-War dominance of French structuralist thought, against which Ricoeur is able to reclaim the humanist core of the hermeneutic task.
