Text as Sliding Signifier

What is it about?

In the 1980s Ricoeur conceptualized metaphoricity and narrativity as twin ends of a discursive field governed by the productive imagination. A decade earlier Ricoeur was working at a significantly different proposition. He wanted to establish a parallel, in fact a strong homology, between metaphor and text. In both cases Ricoeur articulated a complex criteriology to establish the parallelism between the terms. Should we regard the earlier parallel as a first and less precise version of the later? a distinct thesis? a reconcilable claim? a category error? Was the rejection and return an evolution, a clarification, or simply a different topic? The thesis of this close reading of Ricoeur’s middle period writings on metaphor is that the shift of analogical relations is actually a migration from the first to the second homology, and that the second homology is the correct one.

Featured Image

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash