Ricœur’s hermeneutic philosophy. Keys to reflect upon the case of Chile and its memory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5195/errs.2026.761Keywords:
Memory, Narrative, Mutual Recognition, Fragility, Postdictatorial Chile, HermeneuticAbstract
This article argues that Ricœur’s categories of memory, narrative, and recognition illuminate and critically problematize the unresolved ethical and political tensions of post-dictatorial Chile. Human fragility – an anthropological theme central to Ricœur’s thought – underlies political life and reveals its inherent paradoxes. His ethical and political reflections provide a framework for examining the symbolic and narrative dimensions of Chile’s ongoing crisis of social reconciliation, marked by disappeared detainees, persistent impunity, and enduring forms of denialism, despite the efforts undertaken since the restoration of democracy. Ricœur characterizes such phenomena as impeded or manipulated memory. The hermeneutic approach serves both as a methodological mode of inquiry and as a means of understanding the conflict itself. The analysis develops along three interconnected lines: the aporias and limits of memory, the narrative construction of collective experience and its distortions, and the challenges of mutual recognition in the presence of institutional, social, and political barriers. An examination of key Chilean sites and moments of memory tests the explanatory power and limits of Ricœur’s hermeneutic categories when confronted with Chile’s historical experience. The article also examines the narrative dimension through two intersecting registers – factual (reports and testimonies) and fictional (documentary film) – thereby recovering the history/fiction dialectic developed in Time and Narrative III. Finally, it engages critically with objections raised by leading scholars regarding personal and collective memory and their relation to mutual recognition, showing how the Chilean case challenges these categories. In doing so, it demonstrates how a non-European experience of democratic transition enriches Ricœurian debates on the phenomenology of memory developed in Memory, History, Forgetting.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Beatriz Eugenia Contreras Tasso
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