Dubious certainties. Contribution of Du sens II to the understanding of the conflict between history and memory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1980-4016.esse.2024.225855Keywords:
Historical memory, Historical narrative, Greimas, Ricoeur, Theory of historyAbstract
Since 1990, the emergence of memorial politics has caused an acute conflict between historiographic knowledge and duty of memory. There is here a conflict that Greimas presents in Du sens II as the polarity between truth and certainty, “two irreducible forms of semiosis whose coexistence is difficult and ineluctable”. In the first case, a scientific activity, historiography, seeks the truth as a rational correction of memory. In the second, citizens want testimony-based discourses meaningful for present projects. Greimas’s analysis of the veridiction contract and of cognitive discourses allowed the understanding of such differences, and the dubious certainties to which they lead, because the fiduciary veridictive marks of the memorial discourse cannot replace the veridictive logic featured in the historiographical truth, but the latter remains problematic. Du sens II coincided with the beginning by Ricoeur of a long reflection on historical narrative, culminating with La Mémoire, l'histoire, l'oubli, a text with a strong semiotic component. In this essay we will show the relevance of Du sens II to examine the conflict between history and memory, thus building a bridge between semiotics and hermeneutics. Greimas and Ricoeur agree on the irreducibility and possible complementarity of the history-truth and memory-certainty poles.
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