Reading, Aesthetics, and Refiguration in Ricaeur's Hermeneutics

The goal of this article is to focus on the concept of reading in Paul Ricaeur's Time and Narrative, through the notions of triple mimesis and refiguration, in continuity with previous investigations on the issue of hermeneutics and in phenomenology. While relying on developments in philosophical hermeneutics since Gadamer, Ricceur's concept of reading might work as a paradigm allowing to link the layers of interpretation and reception that build out the aesthetic experience. In this way, analyses come into play that make an initial philosophical framework a more complicated one and that allow to extend such paradigm to non-verbal or non-linguistic fields. This article is structured in two sections. The first section aims to specify the general framework of Ricceur's hermeneutics, to review the critical reception of Time and Narrative, and to recall of the constant correlation between refiguration and temporality. The second section more specifically considers the fourth chapter in the second part of Time and Narrative's third volume (French edition) wherein the articulation between reading and aesthetics is developed. However, a critical re-evaluation of this latter development must be provided not only in order to recognise some limitations to Ricceur's approach of refiguration but also to see how the hermeneutical approach is, despite of all, what allows a mediation between the aesthetic and artistic.