A political reading of the notion of "crisis" from the hermeneutic program of Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

First, we propose reviewing Paul Ricoeur‘s journey around the extreme polysemy of the term "crisis" in his article entitled: "La crise: un phénomène spécifiquement moderne?" Secondly, we aim to trace the notions of "crisis", "event" and "sense" as presented by Ricoeur in his hermeneutical program. The challenge will be to develop a political reading of those key her-meneutical concepts. Our hypothesis is that while the locus of reasonable "sense" or "struc-ture" serves to define the political as such, the concepts of "crisis" and "event" are confined to the field of politics, understood as the set of activities whose object is the conquest, the exer-cise, the conservation and the distribution of power. Finally, we will present in the conclusion the result of our enterprise oriented to a reading of Ricoeur‘s hermeneutical program in politi-cal terms, without imposing a mechanical correspondence between his political reflections and his hermeneutical proposal.