Paul Marinescu / Questionner une quasi-absence : le témoignage 87 META: RESEARCH IN HERMENEUTICS, PHENOMENOLOGY, AND PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY VOL. VII, NO. 1 / JUNE 2015: 87-104, ISSN 2067-365, www.metajournal.org Questionner une quasi-absence : le témoignage dans Temps et récit * Paul Marinescu “Alexandru Dragomir” Institute for Philosophy Romanian Academy Abstract Questioning a Quasi-absence: the Testimony in Time and Narrative The starting point of this article is a surprising finding about Ricœur’s Time and Narrative. This impressive trilogy – essentially dedicated to the narrative and its capacity to refigure time, often defined as a poetics of history, laying the basis of the theory of narrative identity – barely considers the phenomenon of the testimony, generally understood as someone’s narration about a past event. But suspecting a paradoxical lacuna in the problematic of Time and Narrative doesn’t exempt us from searching its ‘reasons’. Thus, in the first part of this paper, we’ll take into account, from a genealogical point of view, Ricœur’s article on the hermeneutics of the testimony, written few years before his trilogy. In the second part, the questioning of what we’ve called the quasi-absence of the testimony in Time and Narrative will involve keen analysis of the theories concerning the reality of the past determined according to different criteria: proximity / observation versus pertinence / possibility. Keywords: Ricœur, Testimony, Reality of the Past, Trace, Representation of the Past Introduction Pour marquer d’un seul geste la différence majeure entre les approches de l’histoire développées par Paul Ricœur dans * This paper is suported by the Sectorial Operational Programme Human Resources Development (SOP HRD), financed from the European Social Fund and by the Romanian Government under the contract number SOP HRD/159/1.5/S/136077.