ABSTRACT
Whereas Chapter 4 introduced us to the philosophy of Lévinas, this chapter develops the phenomenology of Paul Ricœur. Lévinas offers a challenging response to generalised accounts of human experience. However, Ricœur is able to enter into the nuanced interplay between language and the body. Ricœur helps us to understand how linguistic communication and conversations about justice are interwoven in a subject’s experience of the world. This narrative phenomenology shows where, for instance, Freud’s psyche requires an account of the material experience. His hermeneutic philosophy requires that we interpret multiple sources in order to understand the meaning of experience. Ricœur’s phenomenological discourse in conversation with contemporary embodied trauma discourse links the embodied situation of healing to the relation of the body and lamentation practices, as a re-situation of ruptured relation. He helps us to make sense of how the violation of justice and the role of narrative feature as two important parts of traumatic experience, thereby maintaining and clarifying the complex interconnections of a subject’s experience.
