Inscribed by the author to Maurice Nadeau (1911-2013) ‘Pour monsieur Maurice Nadeau en hommage Paul Ricoeur’ in black ink to the half title. Nadeau was a literary critic and editor, collaborating early in life with Breton and later writing the major reference work History of Surrealism. His work helped bring to prominence, among others, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller.
Written during Ricoeur’s self-exile from French intellectual life at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, Le Métaphore vive marks a turn in the philosopher’s career away from hermeneutics and towards language itself. Using an examination of metaphorical discourse as its starting point, Ricoeur conceives of ‘live’ metaphors as sentences that are not reducible to an ‘is’ or ‘is not’; existing as both at the same time, such sentences have built into them a creative redescription of the reality that subsists outside their borders. Going on to apply this concept to wider discourses of the poetic, political and religious, this book marks a key intervention in the continued linguistic turn of the French post-War intellectual climate.
