La défatalisation du passé : Paul Ricœur, Jacques Revel et le réalisme critique en historiographie

Une implication scientifique et éthique pour la Corée et l'Afrique

Abstract

Confronted with the "memory saturation" of the 2000s, Paul Ricœur, in Memory, History, Forgetting, enters into a fruitful, though often implicit, dialogue with the critical historiography of the Annales School, embodied here by Jacques Revel. This article aims to construct this intellectual encounter, the methodological significance of which has been under-theorized. By moving beyond the classic opposition between explanation and understanding and integrating the "scale games" (jeux d'échelles) methodology, Ricœur refounds an epistemology of the "attested fact" (fait avéré) that grounds history in a critical realism. We demonstrate how this theoretical convergence enables a "défatalisation" of history, restoring to past actors their capacity for action and their margin of uncertainty. This approach offers a civic alternative to the mere "duty of memory": a duty of critical intelligence, based on a history conceived as a science of complexity. The implications of this approach are explored for post-colonial contexts, particularly in Korea and Africa, where the défatalisation of the past is a condition for opening new horizons.