From the non-existence of language to the narration of pathos: Ricœur and Henry on Literary Experience

Abstract

In this paper, the conceptions of language underlying Paul Ricœur’s and Michel Henry’s phenomenology of literary experience are discussed and compared. On the one hand, while Ricœur’s theory of reception responds to the notion of co-reference that links language to the world, Henry concentrates on the act of creation based on the process of co-impression, by virtue of which a word is seen and resonates in the writer invisibly according to certain affective tonalities. On the other hand, if the core of Ricœurian hermeneutics lies in the fact that the follow-up of the narrative intrigue shapes the reader’s identity and relaunches his action in the world, the Henrician phenomenology of life argues that every understanding of oneself and every relationship with the other is preceded by the most radical equivalence between narration, pathos of suffering and pathos of joy. In the paper’s conclusion, this conceptual journey aims at proposing a «hermeneutics of life» as a theoretical framework for the analysis of literary texts whose figures of vital affect and force go beyond the traditional model of representation.