Ricoeur and Foucault: Between Ontology and Critique

Abstract

In this paper, I trace some of Ricoeur’s criticisms of Foucault in his major works on historiography, and evaluate them. I find that Ricoeur’s criticisms of Foucault’s archaeological project in Time and Narrative are not particularly worrisome, and that Foucault’s “critical” project actually provides alternatives for enriching and expanding on some of Ricoeur’s later insights in Memory, History, Forgetting and – in particular – for troubling the distinction made between critique and ontology.