[Commlist] Call for Contributions: "Ricœur, Dead or Alive?"

Call for Contributions: "Ricœur, Dead or Alive?"
Fonds Ricœur Monthly Seminar – ENS Ulm 2026/27

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: (seminaire.actualites.ricoeur /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(seminaire.actualites.ricoeur /at/ gmail.com)>. Proposals are welcome 
from doctoral students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career 
scholars of any discipline (philosophy, literary studies, theology, 
social sciences, media studies, 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.
We would especially like to receive submissions from people working in 
the digital humanities and communication studies area.

Organizing Committee
Tristan Barberousse (ENS)
Kexin Hu (ENS)
Martina Lodi (Lumsa-ICP)
Qiyu Chen (Montpellier III)

Practical Information
Submissions: (seminaire.actualites.ricoeur /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(seminaire.actualites.ricoeur /at/ gmail.com)>
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 
((seminaire.actualites.ricoeur /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(seminaire.actualites.ricoeur /at/ gmail.com)>).

(This English version of the call for papers was produced from the 
French original with the assistance of AI and revised by the organizers.)
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