Paul Ricoeur: Telling, remembering and forgetting

This excerpt by Bernhard Waldenfels is from the second part of his book, Sociality and Otherness - Modes of Social Experience (Sozialitat und Alteritat - Modi sozialer Erfahrung (Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2015), 363-85), where he tests and further pursues his theory of responsiveness through a series of debates with Husserl, Schutz and Gurwitsch, Searle, Castoriadis, Foucault, and Ricoeur. In his discussion of the latter's work, he focuses on the themes of memory and forgetting, primarily in Time and Narrative and Memory, History, Forgetting. The text is divided into four sections. In the first two, Waldenfels revisits Ricoeur's arguments which he insists did not sufficiently attend to the importance of forgetting in narratives. In the last two, the author proposes a revision of the Ricoeurian philosophy of forgetting under the heading of a responsive phenomenology. Both with and against Ricoeur, Waldenfels considers forgetting as a pathos that forces us to respond.