ABSTRACT
La Metaphore vive investigated the resources of rhetoric to show how language undergoes creative mutations and transformations. The author's work on narrativity, Temps et récit, develops this inquiry into the inventive power of language. Marxism as an ideology of liberation, of the powerless, can easily become, as happened with the German Social Democrats or with Stalin, an ideology which imposes a new kind of oppressive power: the proletariat thus ceases to be a living human community of subjects and becomes instead an impersonal, abstracted concept in a new system of scientific determinism. The invaluable contribution made by structuralism was to offer an exact scientific description of the codes and paradigms of language. The problem for a hermeneutics of language is not to rediscover some pristine immediacy but to mediate again and again in a new and more creative fashion. The mediating role of imagination is forever at work in lived reality.
