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the assertive vehemence of the historian’s representation as standing for the past isauthorized by nothing other than the positive of the event having seen intended acrossthe negativity of the being that no longer. (p.280)In a similar manner, in La Métaphore vive he speaks of:paradoxe indépassable qui s’attache à une conception métaphorique de vérité. Leparadoxe consiste en ceci qu’il n’est pas d’autre façon de rendre justice à la notion devérité métaphorique que d’inclure la pointe critique du ‘n’est pas’ (littéralement) dansla véhémence ontologique du ‘est’ (métaphoriquement). 1This touches on the proximity and distance between historic representation and poeticfiction: precisely because it is not about the same absence, it cannot be precisely about thesame affirmation, of the same vehemence, of the same attestation. We will come back tothis when speaking of confidence and the forms of credibility.To bring us a step closer to our topic, we must note that the critical gesture of thedistinction of register is not separated in Ricoeur, as we have just seen, from their rearticulationin a somehow broken dialectic, or rather in a zigzag without a determined end.In this sense the historical problem of representation is always already also a political,pragmatic and practical problem. Since the task is “to make human interactions intelligible”(p. 184), it is not enough to blend the external order of their causes and the internal orderof their reasons, it is necessary to understand their ties and their history woven ofdiscordances as much as of concordances, 2 of conflicts as much as of agreements:just as macrohistory is attentive to the weight of structural constraints exercised over thelong time span, to a similar degree microhistory is attentive to the initiative and capacityfor negotiation of historical agents in situations marked by uncertainty. (p. 187)Ricoeur nonetheless refuses to let uncertainty in its turn become a category that explainseverything. (p. 226) It is why Ricoeur, after having recognized the unpredictability inwhich the historical actor moves, 3 faithful to the Arendtian polarity between promise andforgiveness, balances uncertainty and unpredictability by the irreparable and irreversible.At this point he passes perhaps a little quickly over the dispute and the conflict, irreducibleto a simple rational competition between choices, through which this very actorhas to struggle, to interpret his or her situation and to differ from others. The historiographicconflict of interpretations and systems of historicity is thus founded on thehistorical disputes themselves. On the other hand Ricoeur makes, it seems to me, the irreparablea central category not only for historic representation but for the historical actorswho, we sometimes forget, carried with them their own mournings, their own irreparables --and their own disputes about the irreparable.It is one of the centers of gravity of Memory, History, Forgetting, to hold (with Michelde Certeau) historical writing as that which makes room for death (p. 550 no. 1), for theirrevocable (p. 364), to that which cannot be acted on, to the not-at-hand according to1Paul Ricoeur, La Métaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 321. Translator note: As the primary text,quotations from Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, are taken from the Kathleen Blamey andDavid Pellauer translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). All secondary quotations havebeen left in the original.2Paul Ricoeur, Temps et Récit 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1983). See the entire first part on emplotment.3Who looks to reduce uncertainty and who exists only in somehow formulating vows or promises.See the work of Arendt and Nietzsche on promising.94