Sontag/Ricœur: metaphoricity, pathology and rhetorical disputes

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to compare Paul Ricœur’s defense of poetic discourse in his theory of the “living” metaphor and Susan Sontag's criticism of the use of metaphors in the description of pathologies. By removing the productivity of metaphors from the scope of analysis of poetic discourse and placing it in the rhetorical dispute scope for the disease, Sontag questions such productivity without denying it. Emphasizing the manipulability of metaphors points to the common root of productivity that Ricœur and Sontag both share when they take Aristotle as the starting point for the defense and the criticism of poetic and rhetorical figures in discourse, respectively. This article analyzes how these interpretations of power and use of metaphors relate to a conflict between ontology and epistemology found in Ricœur's philosophical work and Sontag's philosophical and literary work. The article also addresses a model of metaphorical understanding that points to the harmful use of metaphors as a cause of situations of hermeneutic injustice.