Phantasia and historiographic epistemology: a critical Reading of Ricoeur’s triple mimesis

Abstract

The narrativity to which the historiographical narrative is subjected finds in memory its hypothesis of identification and identity, which elevates the problem of narrative quality into a level in which the distribution of categorical narratives is, in itself, not sufficient for the emergence of discontinuity. What is at stake is the impossibility of transforming the object – which would undermine the nature of historiography and would take out the epistemological status that it can hold. To admit narrativity as an irruption of what is discontinuous leads to a need to reread permanence. Permanence is an inchoative form of permanere, which means nothing less than “remain until the end”. Therefore, what is the importance of the system of triple mimesis proposed by Paul Ricoeur? What pertinence can it have in the field of historiographical narrative? In other words, is it possible or viable to think about Ricoeur’s paradigm in theory of history and historiography?