“I have always used this term [world], not out of concession, nor facility, but as a strong term whose development can be traced through Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer. What is a world? It is something one can live in; something that can be hospitable, strange, hostile…. In this way there are fundamental feelings that are unrelated to any specific object or thing but which depend on the world in which the work appears; these are, in sum, pure modalities of inhabiting. I think that it is not by reason of complaisance or rhetoric that we speak, for example, of the ‘Greek world,’ even if this is each time on the basis of a singular work: the work, which is itself a singular world, brings to light an aspect or a facet of the “Greek world’; that is to say that it is of greater value than itself-it refers to a sort of surrounding environment, it attests to a capacity to expand itself and to occupy an entire space of consideration or of mediation in face of which a spectator can situate herself. There is no doubt that the spectator is placed opposite the work, confronting it. But at the same time, she is in the midst of the world created by this ‘opposite.’ These are two perfectly complementary aspects, and the pretense of mastery in the simple face-to-face with the work: a world is something that surrounds me, that can submerge me; in any case, it is something I do not produce but in which I find myself.

Thus one cannot use the term ‘world,’ in a rigorous sense, unless the work performs for the spectator or the reader the work of refiguration that overturns expectations and changes horizons; it is only inasmuch as it can refigure this world that the work reveals itself as capable of a world.

This is a point I insist upon. For if one makes the work of art-be it literary, plastic, or musical-simply the center of the constitution of an unreal order, one removes its bite, its power over the real. Let us not forget the twofold nature of the sign: retreat from and transfer back into the world. If art did not have, despite its retreat, the capacity to come bursting into our midst, into our world, it would be completely innocuous; it would be struck with insignificance and reduced to sheer entertainment, it would be confined to a parenthesis in our concerns. I think we have to go back as far as possible in this direction and maintain that the capacity to make a return into the world is carried to its greatest intensity by the work of art, precisely because the retreat made here is infinitely more radical than in ordinary language, where this function is blunted, attenuated. As the representational function is lessened-this is the case with nonfigurative painting and with music when it is nondescriptive-as the gap with reality grows wider, the biting power of the work on the world of our experience is reinforced. The greater the retreat, the more intense the return back upon the real, as coming from a greater distance, as if our experience were visited from infinitely further away than itself. We have a sort of counterexperience of this hypothesis in the example of photography as it is practiced by amateurs, when what we obtain is simply a double of the real, with a return to the origin by way of only a very small loop, and, as a result, its grasp on our world is infinitely less. As for art photography, it also claims, but at a much higher cost, to free itself from imitation, from mere representation, and also constructs its object on the border, so to speak, of the reduplication of reality….

For a long time, the representative function in pictorial art was held to have prevented the expressive function from being fully deployed and the work from making itself into a world in competition with the real in a realm beyond all reality. And it is only in the twentieth century, when the break with representation has been completed that, as in the wish expressed by Malraux, an ‘imaginary museum’ has been created in which world of very different styles coexist, provided that each excels in its own realm. Everything can be brought together, just as in our big cities a Roman Catholic church and a skyscraper can exist side by side or a Gothic cathedral next to the Georges Pompidou Center. For this to be possible, it was necessary that the signs had to be emptied of any external designation; only then could they enter into all sorts of imaginable relations with other signs; between them there is now a sort of infinite availability for incongruous associations. Everything can go together, from the moment that one admits along with Malraux that there is no progress from one style to another, but only within each style, moments of perfection” (Ricoeur 1998:175-176).

Ricoeur, Paul
1998[1995] Critique & Conviction. Kathleen Blamey, trans. New York: Columbia University Press.

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