Ricœur on the body: a response to Richard Kearney

This brief exercise is simultaneously a comment on Richard Kearney’s bold and overarching project of a carnal hermeneutics, a response to his reading of Paul Ricœur’s take on the body and “flesh” (including Ricœur’s tentative and never explicitly assumed “hermeneutics of the flesh”), and a modest attempt to indicate some additional possible pathways for the carnal hermeneutical project. My two main goals are (1) to expand Kearney’s reading of the topic of the body and of a possible “carnal hermeneutics” in Ricœur’s philosophy to show that this topic is present in works that Kearney does not mention in his chapter; and (2) to try to show that while Ricœur’s explorations of the aforementioned topic are tentative, the importance of embodiment was always in the backdrop of his philosophy, in spite of his textual turn of the 1960s–1980s. In the first section of this response, I recall some of the main guiding threads of Richard Kearney’s and Brian Treanor’s project of a “carnal hermeneutics,” putting it in the context of other developments in Kearney’s philosophy and stressing its importance....