[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

collective memory, which is expressed and shaped on this level. The trust he places inthe benefits expected to follow from this culture of controversy is related to his moraland political credo on behalf of a liberal society – in the political sense that Englishspeakingauthors give to the term “liberal.” (p. 323)It is, however, not only about the credibility of the testimonies in the juridical space ofa lawsuit, but also about the reciprocal credibility (and of the incredulity) of history andmemory. Here we find once again Ricoeur’s classic oscillation between a hermeneuticpole of belonging to the world already and a critical pole of distance and pluralism -- withthis double connection of the autonomy of critical and comparative history with respectto memory, and of the dependence of history with respect to the memory of the incomparable,of that which was and “demande a être raconté.” The rehabilitation of memoryin history proposes to find a point of balance, before the excess of credulity in the onedrags the other into total skepticism. In passing we note, to complete the previous quote,that it is necessary to re-establish the balance between the liberalism of trust and thecritique of suppressed dissensus:Of course, not everything historical can be included within situations of conflict ordenunciation. Nor do they all come down to situations of the restoration of confidencethrough the creation of new rules, through the establishment of new uses, or therenovation of old ones. These situations only illustrate the successful appropriation ofthe past. Inadaptation contrary to the fitting act, too, stems from the present of history,in the sense of the present of the agents of history. Appropriation and denial ofrelevance are there to attest that the present of history does include a dialecticalstructure. (p. 226)It is because of this delicate balance between trust and dissensus that the historian mustbroaden the range and what Ricoeur calls “l’échelle des aspects non quantitatifs des tempssociaux.” He thus mentions authors such as Bernard Lepetit to show how the slowcontinuity and discontinuity of changes, with regard to the agreements and deepdisagreements of a society, should be treated as the opposite ends of the same spectrum.The dialectical structure of the historical present, which is more a practical exercise ofinitiative than a theoretical representation, acts as intersection between the horizon ofexpectation and the experiential space so dear to Kosseleck, but without being able todesignate, at the intersection of the legal and the historical, an absolute third party. Thejudicial lawsuit proposes a form of a third party, and historiographic narration also,certainly. To retrieve and pursue the four categories of responsibility that Ricoeurpreviously borrowed from Jaspers, there would also be the narrative one tells a friend, andthe somehow metaphysical responsibility of the “survivors” before God. But thesedifferent faces of “party” do not comprise a system: “The vow of impartiality must thusbe considered in light of the impossibility of an absolute third party.” (p. 314)As with the philosophy of ordinary language, the solution to the problem is not foundin an assured certainty, but in the confident acceptance of this uncertain situation, of thistroubling strangeness of the ordinary, in the wonder that we nevertheless so often mangeto understand one another, trust one another, without ever being able to force it to happen.Recall the formula: “we have nothing better than testimony, in the final analysis, to assureourselves that something did happen in the past.” (p. 147) I would gladly bring it closerto the famous words of J. L. Austin, in How to Do Things with Words: “Our speech is ouraction.” How to trust language, but not to put our trust in it? How do we not credit thecapacity of the ordinary actors, speakers, and narrators to express more or less what theydo and feel, and to understand and want what they say?101