Paul Ricoeur: Tradition and Innovation in Rhetorical Theory (review)

This well-researched, clearly organized, and cogently argued study represents a remarkable scholarly achievement, not least because the book contributes importantly to at least four domains of inquiry at once: the history and theory of rhetoric, the history of philosophy (and in particular interactions among epistemology, hermeneutics, rhetoric, and poetics), twentieth-century intellectual history more broadly, and intellectual biography. Especially remarkable is how the author, having distilled from Ricoeur’s oeuvre a constellation of ideas relevant to core issues of rhetoric, brings the philosopher’s work into dialogue with classical rhetorical theory—to the mutual illumination of both bodies of discourse. As Ritivoi puts it in the introduction, drawing on Ricoeur’s own concept of interpretive “distantiation”: “by reading classical concepts through Ricoeur’s lens I hope to create a critical vantage from which the scrutiny can yield more reliable results, while on the other hand by reading Ricoeur himself from the perspective of rhetorical theory I hope to create a vantage from which his concepts can be more thoroughly examined” (10). The result is a study that provides not only a metatheoretical account of the theoretical underpinnings of rhetorical inquiry, relevant for specialists interested in enriching the base of concepts on which current-day practice is grounded, but also an extraordinarily compact, useable primer on Ricoeur’s philosophical concerns and methods. Indeed, given the voluminousness of Ricoeur’s writings (helpfully assembled in a comprehensive, 9-page bibliography at the end of the book), readers in a variety of fields will benefit from Ritivoi’s concise overview, which provides a sense of Ricoeur’s larger philosophical project on its own terms—as well as an account of how that project might be used to recontextualize and revitalize the conceptual core of rhetoric as a discipline.