In this article, from his Lectures I: Autour du politique, Ricoeur addresses and subjects to critical examination the political thought of Hannah Arendt, taking as his starting point her paper ‘On Violence’, and her treatment of the conceptual pair power and violence. In investigating Arendt’s cardinal distinction between these concepts, Ricoeur brings to light the way in which Arendt’s thinking goes against the grain of the dominant tradition in political science, that which holds power to be defined in terms of (...) domination. Rejecting this interpretation, Arendt proposes an alternative concept of power that has nothing to do with domination but everything to do with consent, and group agency. Opening up Arendt’s thinking on the relationship between power, violence and domination, Ricoeur reveals how two planes of Arendt’s thought — the phenomeno-anthropological and the political — mirror and illuminate each other, in terms of the separation of concepts and the systems of distinctions that appear in each plane. While appreciative of Arendt’s thinking, and of her appeal to an ‘other’ tradition of political thought that can be traced back to the Roman civitas, Ricoeur seeks to question the epistemic status of her discourse and determine how, or from where, such distinctions derive their authority. His own hypothesis is then introduced: the constitution of power in a human group has the status of the forgotten, in that power is the forgotten present of political action. Working with this hypothesis, Ricoeur holds, we can begin to make sense of the difficulties and ambiguities that arise within Arendtian discourse. He then performs a re-reading of the cardinal distinction of power and violence in light of this hypothesis, before introducing two further key political concepts — opinion and authority — and investigating the relation these hold to power and violence, in particular the relation between power and authority. (shrink)

ABSTRACTProfessional wrestling is a popular, global, performance phenomenon that is in many respects sport-like, but tends to be shunned by serious sports fans for its alleged ‘fakeness’. Yet its own fans often behave exactly like regular sports fans: getting caught up in the action, responding emotionally to the performances, and engaging in critical analysis of the competitive strategies and the turns of events. How does this alleged ‘fake sport’ engender such complex and deeply emotional appreciation? Here I provide an analysis (...) of pro-wrestling that explains and emphasises its narrative, dramatic and fictional aspects, showing it to be a complex representational work that can be appreciated aesthetically and emotionally on a number of levels. (shrink)

In his discussions of life as narrative, and identity as narrative identity, Paul Ricoeur has claimed that we learn to become narrators and heroes of our own stories, without actually becoming the authors of our own lives. This idea, that we cannot be the author of our own life-story in the same way that the author of fictional narrative is the author of that story, seems at first incontestable, given that we are caught up within the enactment of the narrative (...) that is our life, unlike the author of a fictional story who also has an independent existence outside that story. This asymmetry leads Ricoeur to pronounce that an ineradicable difference exists between fictional and life narratives. But is this difference in fact ineffaceable, or is there a sense in which we can be said to be the authors of our own lives? In this article I suggest that there are more points of similarity than Ricoeur explicitly recognizes between what authors do in writing fictional narratives and what we do in figuring, prospectively, our lives. These similarities are brought to light by a revision of the naïve, received concept of author and, once acknowledged, serve to bridge the purportedly ‘unbridgeable gap’ between fictional narratives and life narratives. I then consider how bridging this gap — establishing ourselves as authors as well as narrators — has ethical implications with regard to creating our own lives: a creation which authoring implies, but which is — given the revised notion of author — limited, both by the reciprocity of the other as co-author and by those events in life which the life-author is not fully able to plot. (shrink)