Paul Ricoeur’s Thought of Place and the Test of Landscape. A Possible Dialogue Between Hermeneutics, Performative Aesthetics and Phenomenology

Abstract

In this article, we argue that Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of spaces and the aesthetics vision of the landscape as a performance, based on the contemporary theories of Erika Fischer-Lichte, can integrate each other through the mediation of Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of the a priori. In particular, we will show how the representations and the hermeneutics of a landscape as a peculiar “text” are essentially connected with its the pre-reflective experience, which, being made possible by the activation of precise material – and therefore historical and cultural – a priori, can be thus translated into images and words. By intertwining hermeneutics, phenomenology, and performative esthetics we will provide with a non-reductive philosophical description of a landscape, i.e., a definition that does not neglect the aspects of it suggested by its linguistic pre-comprehension and artistic representations.