2003-06-24
12 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
As I understand it, the goal of Ricoeur's studies is to formulate a notion of the subject that is not susceptible to the same objections and aporia as Descartes's cogito. To accomplish this, he analyzes discursive situations and comes to the conclusion that the subject is first and foremost a being, i.e., a body in space, and that the subject understands herself first and foremost as such. Grammar reveals this self-objectivation (to borrow a term from Habermas) in that the reflexive "I" is a grammatical substitution for a corresponding third-person deictic term: "I" is the "she" of the speaking subject to the "he/him" is the "you" of the interlocutor as told from the perspective of the speaking subject, who occupies the same spatiotemporal point as the subject's particular body.
Ricoeur's findings appear rather plausible, but I cannot help but think that his findings imply sort of transcendental, or perhaps I should say, para- or transsubjective, awareness on the part of the subject that is inarticulable (neologism?) yet essential to her awareness as a body within a discursive situation. In other words, by virtue of the fact that the subject grammatically isolates herself differentially vis-à-vis her interlocutor in a discursive situation seems to me to imply that the subject's self-awareness is not as spatiotemporally limited as the body that it inhabits, or, more accurately with which it is coextensive (consubstantial?). I therefore remain uncertain on how prioritizing the corporeal subject before the thinking subject avoids the aporia of Cartesian subjectivity.
