Abstract

This thesis is an attempt to pursue the hermeneutics of the historical condition in the work of Paul Ricoeur through investigations of our relation of indebtedness to the past in the present and for the future. The working hypothesis is that this relation to the past appears differently depending on the style of our interrogation: epistemologically, the past appears as that which is no longer; ontologically, the past appears as that which has been. The ambivalence points to an aporia concerning the manner of the persistence of the absent in the present, an aporia that has no speculative resolution but one that can be made fruitful by a practical synthesis: the initiative of the citizen. It is at the level of the proper mode of discourse of the citizen, that is, at the level of opinion, that we pay our debt to the past, through an effort to remember more or an effort to forget. The epistemic weakness of this attestation, its declarative character, is the only possible mode of repayment. In this sense, we never finish with the past and remain haunted by the threat or promise of insolvency.