The Ethics of Love as Translation of History and Finitude: An Essay from Paul Ricoeur

• Main Author: Madalina Guzun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Università degli Studi di Cagliari 2020-07-01
• Series: Critical Hermeneutics
• Online Access: https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/article/view/4194

Could an ethical reasoning give an answer to the crisis of historicity ? The scope of the present article is to address the question of ethics along with Paul Ricœur, by analyzing the relation between love and justice and by drawing a parallel between this relation and the way in which Jacques Derrida defines translation. Through the Ricœurien description of love as Christian love of enemies and through the description of justice as distributive justice, we show that love corresponds to an anhistorical dimension, which transgresses our facticity, while justice belongs to facticity, finitude and historicity. Their conflict is overcome by Ricœur, who shows that the two are reciprocally dependent. Their relation is nonetheless marked by an asymmetry which does not allows us to consider it as a mere dialectic. Along with Jacques Derrida, we may conceive this relation as a translation and we may thus hermeneutically reconsider the nature of translation itself. This approach sheds a new light both on the Ricœurien relation between love and justice and on the question of historicity.