polylog 34 Seite 151 Francesco Ferrari is a post-doc researcher at the Jena Center for Reconciliation Studies of the Friedrich-Schiller- University Jena. His current research focuses on the role of forgiveness in reconciliatory processes according to different authors from the Jewish moral philosophy of the XX Century. francesco.ferrari@uni-jena.de Francesco Ferrari Memory, Identity, Forgiveness Archaeological and Teleological Perspectives of Reconciliation from Paul Ricœur Guilt is not the discriminating factor but rather [it is] reconciliation which places its inal stamp on the entire series of mnemonic operations. (Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli) First Remarks This paper reconstructs and presents the ef- forts of French philosopher Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) to understand reconciliation. 1 It 1 Through his relection on the most fundamen- tal issues of Western philosophy, such as language, symbol, ethics, history, and evil, Paul Ricœur (1913– 2005) can be hailed as the most prominent represen- tative of French hermeneutics. He called his own method the »long way« of joining hermeneutics and deals with three central issues in reconcilia- tory processes, including memory, identity, and forgiveness. They are presented as actual forces, working through two interconnected and inseparable movements: an archaeologi- cal movement directed towards the past, and a teleological one aiming towards the future. 2 I show their intertwined action to be a con- stitutive dimension of reconciliation. The paper shows how a merely archaeological di- mension of memory necessarily faces a host of contradictions and how this may even lead to an intolerant identity. From the other side, it phenomenology, through a wide comparison with structuralism, theories of language, psychoanalysis, and philosophy of religion. 2 For the dyad constituted by »archaeology« and »teleology«, (see Ricœur 1965); (English transl. see 1970), in particular the third chapter of its third section, Dialectic: Archaeology and Teleology (see 1970, 459–493).