The Rule of Metaphor by Paul Ricoeur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve decided that Ricoeur is more of a meta-rhetorician, a philosopher of rhetoric in the sense that unlike many other rhetoricians and semioticians, he doesn’t do any hard low level analysis himself. He may analyze terms, other’s uses of terms, and with encyclopedic mastery, run the gambit of tearing through collected works of so many others to pull the threads he needs to weave a larger discourse, but he almost never takes you through line by line synthesis and application. Stranger too, he never presents you a diagramatic appraisal of the field. He presents you choice snippets and then at the end provides you his tact conclusion. Ever so polite, his writing generally doesn’t explode off the page either.
In this book, he tackles metaphor. Tries to find a place for it, and in the end results in universalizing it. While he goes through the figure of metaphor across many discourses relating to metaphor (poetics, tropes, semantics of word and discourse, and finally reference and philosophy) Ricoeur is able to construct a place for metaphor such that metaphor is a kind of column, a null point from which each of these fields can be organized and made coherent. His conclusions is that the zero sum signifier of the copula (to be) is only a nullified designator of which metaphor is the rule — not the exception. Copula’s nullification is only made possible because of the height of its position within semantic conception — metaphors serve more as the general binder for various arrangements. In this way, Ricoeur flips the relation of metaphor and positivist discourse on its head; metaphor is the general mode of presentation.
While this seems to presents a kind of detachment of language from the field of designation (or reality is composed only of language) it would be a mistake to jump to this relativist position, as Ricoeur makes clear, words need to be of something in order for there to be the stability of difference, even if expression can always be overcoded through metaphorization.
What Ricoeur wants to talk about rather, is the possibility of discourse. Rhetoric doesn’t decide what is said it only describes what it is possible to say, and how we can connect one part to another, to get to One or many ones, although for Ricoer there is no One, although as he notes Heidigger and many others are looking still for the magical word, the One that will designate One upon which justification is self-justified without appeal to semantic slippage.
All in all, I found this book to be a good read, although I was less interested in what others have said than what he says. Ricoeur still remains worth while to read, though he is less flashy and in that way more down to earth as one who goes through the widely ignored field of rhetoric to find the stabilizing struts of discourse itself, at a tactical level, rather than the starry-eyed strategies of ones like Deleuze, Foucault or Zizek.
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