REVELATION AS EVENT: RICOEURIAN DISCOURSE AND RICHIRIAN AFFECTIVITY IN THE INTERPRETATION OF BIBLICAL PREHISTORY

Abstract

This study compares Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of symbolic and linguistic mediation and Marc Richir’s transcendental phenomenology in their distinct approaches to revelation through the act of reading biblical prehistory. For Ricoeur, reading involves the intentional exteriorization of discourse, achieving semantic autonomy by projecting a world of text. This interpretive process enables self-purification from narcissistic illusions. Analyzing Genesis,
Ricoeur emphasizes creation’s foundational but inaugurated character, separate from datable history. Biblical accounts are polyphonic, revealing creation as a fragile, broken order. Richir utilizes a hyperbolic phenomenological reduction to reach a realm anterior to symbolic structures. This primordial phenomenalization is connected to non-intentional phantasia, fundamentally driven by blind affectivity. Reading constitutes an affective event, employing
perceptive phantasia to facilitate empathy into characters’ non-positional emotional lives. Richir critiques the ‘false self’ and rejects the traditional interpretation of biblical prehistory. Through Melville, he interprets Ahab’s hunt for Leviathan as a tyrannical challenge to creation, demonstrating that Moby Dick embodies the sublime, negative figure of affectivity distorted by tyranny and self-hatred. The Billy Budd narrative exposes the inevitable horizon of tyranny underlying the socio-political order. The paper argues that both thinkers seek to liberate selfhood from narcissistic illusions. Ricoeur achieves this through reading as the symbolically mediated event. Richir instead demands an immediate appeal to affectivity.