"Ricœur, Dead or Alive?" Fonds Ricœur Monthly Seminar (ENS, Paris)

Presentation of the Seminar

The seminar "Actualités de Ricœur" ("Ricœur Studies Today") aims to offer a space for discussion and development for early-career research on Ricœur. Hosted at the École Normale Supérieure for the 2026–2027 academic year, it welcomes proposals from doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career scholars who wish to explore, extend, or put to the test the resources of Paul Ricœur's philosophy.

The first edition of this seminar is entitled "Ricœur, Dead or Alive?" — a deliberately ambiguous formulation, one that invites us to question both the internal vitality of his œuvre and its capacity to nourish the philosophical, ethical, and political debates of today.

Is Ricœur's hermeneutic phenomenology not defined, in essence, by its defense of — and, as it were, its "vow" (vœu) in favor of — life, the living, and the lively? But is he still a living interlocutor, or has his thought sedimented into heritage?

The seminar will follow this format: two speakers per two-hour session, with 30 minutes of presentation and 30 minutes of discussion for each speaker.

For paper proposals, we welcome submissions engaging with three thematic axes.

Axis I. Life as Resistance – Language, Time, and Action

How does life affirm, narrate, and configure itself in the face of what negates it? Ricœur's hermeneutic phenomenology is traversed by a fundamental tension between the power to act and the multiple forms of its hindrance. Confronted with evil, forgetting, or indeed death, Ricœur explores the diverse forms of resistance at work within life — metaphors, narratives, memories, history. These resistances, as actions, possess an intrinsic logic and continue to create the meaning of life.

Suggested Lines of Approach

1. Language as resistance: How does the "living metaphor" (The Rule of Metaphor, 1975) constitute a form of resistance to the "entropy of language," which freezes meaning? In what sense is semantic innovation a vital act, a "revival"?

2. Narrative as resistance: In Time and Narrative (1983–1985), emplotment is presented as a provisional victory over temporal discordance. How are we to think this victory in the face of the radicality of Heideggerian "being-towards-death"?

3. Memory as resistance: Memory, History, Forgetting (2000) distinguishes between forgetting kept in reserve and forgetting through effacement. In what way does this distinction commit us to an ethics of memory as a form of fidelity to life?

Axis II. A Life of One's Own – Selfhood, Vulnerability, Ethicity

How might vulnerability, far from being a limit of subjectivity, be its very condition of ethical possibility? Ricœur's hermeneutics of the self is built upon the recognition of a constitutive fragility: narrative identity is always exposed to rupture, to suffering, to undergoing the action of the other — the other inscribing at the very heart of the self. This axis proposes to deepen reflection on the relation between the self and the other, and to explore the modes by which a "good life" may be accomplished, starting from the concrete ordeals of vulnerability: trauma, the quest for mutual recognition, and the precariousness of existence.

Suggested Lines of Approach

4. The ordeal of narrative identity: Oneself as Another (1990) articulates idem-identity and ipse-identity around the self-constancy under trial. What becomes of this articulation when the trial is that of identity's collapse — serious illness, exile, trauma? Ricœur's hermeneutics of narrative identity also resonates with debates on the performativity of identity and with gender studies (Butler).

5. The reciprocity of recognition: In The Course of Recognition (2004), Ricœur moves from self-recognition to mutual recognition. How might this course enter into dialogue with contemporary theories of vulnerability (Weil, Levinas) or of care?

6. The ethical life: The "ethical aim" defined in the "ethical studies" (Oneself as Another, Studies 5-7) seeks to realize a "good life." Does this notion remain operative in the face of situations of thwarted life, precarity, or desubjectivation?

Axis III. Ricœur’s Survival – Present Legacies

Ricœur maintained a singular relationship with his own era, marked as much by fruitful resonances as by sharp conflicts. This axis seeks to interrogate the philosophical actuality of these past debates: what extensions, what corrections, and what ruptures does Ricœurian thought call for today? Proposals will place Ricœur's texts in critical dialogue with contemporary problematics, without confining themselves to historical reconstruction.

Suggested Lines of Approach

7. Radical alterity in phenomenology: Ricœur engaged in a twofold critical dialogue with Derridean deconstruction and Levinasian ethics — two distinct contestations of the autonomy of the self, the one through the play of language, the other through the ethical injunction of the face. How do these confrontations, taken together, illuminate the limits and the resources of the hermeneutics of the self in the face of the contemporary challenges of hospitality, communication, and responsibility?

8. Philosophical anthropology: Is the human being, understood as the "capable human being" (From Text to Action, 1986), in a position to accommodate new forms of agency — collective, distributed, digital — or do its anthropological presuppositions constrain it? In this regard, Ricœurian philosophy could enter into fruitful dialogue with the theories of Stiegler (tertiary retention) and Arendt (collective action).

9. Justice today: How might Ricœur's reflections on justice, collective memory, and forgiveness (Memory, History, Forgetting, Epilogue) be articulated with the contemporary stakes of memory conflicts, politics of reconciliation, or postcolonial reparations? Ricœur's philosophy is bound up with figures such as Halbwachs, Derrida, and Honneth. His reflection on memory and forgiveness continues to shed lasting light on the practices of transitional justice.

Submission Guidelines

To submit a proposal or for any inquiries, please write to us at the following address: [email protected]. Proposals are welcome from doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career scholars of any discipline (philosophy, literary studies, theology, social sciences, law), provided that they are grounded in Ricœur's texts and in contemporary debates for which Ricœurian theory could be fruitfully mobilized. Comparative and transdisciplinary proposals are welcome. We will accept proposals in French and in English.

Practical Information

Submissions: [email protected]

Submission deadline: 20 September 2026

Venue: École Normale Supérieure, 45 rue d'Ulm, Paris (75005)

Frequency: monthly (2026–2027 academic year), normally on the last Tuesday of each month, beginning however on Tuesday 6 October.

Schedule: 6 October; 27 October; 24 November; 15 December (due to the holiday break); 26 January; 23 February; 30 March; 27 April.

Paper proposals must follow these guidelines:

An anonymized abstract of 400 to 600 words in Word format, specifying the title of the paper, the chosen axis, and the thesis defended, accompanied by an indicative bibliography.

A brief bio-bibliographical note (name, affiliation, current position, thesis supervisor where applicable) should be included in the body of the email. To facilitate the archiving and processing of your submission, we kindly ask you to format the subject line of your email as follows: [Seminar Application] Surname – Title of the Paper. Formatting guidelines for the (anonymous) abstract: Times New Roman or Arial, 12-point font, 1.5 line spacing.

We wish for the papers to be delivered in person, in order to facilitate the discussions that lie at the heart of the seminar spirit of this initiative. A link will nevertheless be available for those who wish to follow the event remotely, where applicable.

The seminar has no dedicated budget for the reimbursement of travel and accommodation expenses, and in-person participation is at the speakers' own expense. We therefore encourage them to explore, as a first step, the funding available from their research unit, doctoral school, or home institution.

Selected speakers will be invited to submit a preparatory text (25,000 characters maximum), to be circulated to participants one week before the session, and sent to the contact address ([email protected]).