Poul Ricoeur, Time and Newrabive - U3 Narrated Time ‘an immortal human jes to the rank ofa postula ugh wii igure of our ancestors, the icon of his fe the documentary stock of an i that produces the Arcntves, Documents, TRACES ‘The notion of a trace consiues « new connector Between the ion arising out of phenomen Aca eres, pose wat do we mean by archives? If we open the Encyclopaedia Universalis and the Encyclopaedia Brisan- the former we read, “archives are d by the set of documents that res physical or moral person.” The I the organized body of records produced rrogate its remains, how to question them. In this respect, the most valuable traces are the ones that were not intended from our informa ans’ interrogations are guided by the theme chosen ing documents produced by an goal of conserving or preserving ‘even if this choice is made onl ms of the presumed usefulness documents, and hence of the activity they stem from. The Eneyelopaedi 116 urNarrated Time between documents and monuments has served as the touchstone of this criti- cism. AS Jacques Le Goff reminds us in an insightful article in the En: jaudi, archives were for a long time designated by the term ‘or example, the Monumenta Germaniae Hisiorica, which 826. The development of positivist history at the end. hand the beginning of the twentieth centuries marked document over the monument. What makes a monument suspect, even though the document over the monument. This new tack against the conditions of historical prod conscious intentions. In this sense we must say with Le Gof bating, The data in a data bank are suddenly crowned with a halo of the same authority as the document cleansed by positivist criticism. The illusion is even ‘more dangerous in this ease. As soon as the idea of a debt to the dead, to people of flesh and blood to whom something really happened in the past, cory loses it kind of scholarly ological detour destined to lead fo an enlargm 118 Historical Time its encounter with the monopoly exercised over speech by the powerful and the clerisy. For history has always been a critique of social narratives an this sense, a rectification of our common memory. Every documentary re tion lies along this same trajectory the sense of having passed a certain place) the sense of having happened). This is not surpris- the fact that the passage no longer is but lexity over the idea of the vestigial image as some of a trace and its extension to a thing. People from the past left these vestiges. However they are also the products of their activities and their work, hence they are those things Heidegger speaks of as subsisting and at hand (tools, dwellings, temples, tombs, writings) that ry8 ‘more durable support than the ‘of human beings. In part is because humans worked, stone, or bone, or baked clay tablets, or papyrus, ‘or a computer's memory, that their works outlive | their works remain, But they remain as things among other things. This “thing tion. It introduces a relationship of cause to effect and the marked thing. So the trace combines a rel ing that made it nes that also carry the beyond for the trace, as conserved and no longer in the process of being laid down, to ‘a dated document. us to take up again the 120 Historical Time phenomenology seeks in vain to understand and the temporality of Care. ferret relying only on ware of the problem. His ees an autonomous epi he proposes to this enigma redou certainly correct when be states that what no longer is, is te world Which these “remains” once belonged, as equipment. As he say tion tual relationship when he adds 0 between da-gewesen and ver} guish these two terms, we have to skt ing from the first. We m in the secondary ‘of and we begin to pose unsolvable questions concerning tl tion of this iliation of meaning a account for what Heidegger ‘The remains of the past, wi leading example of what is world-historic selves what seem to be the carriers of the significa But can we avoid anti sematic of very heart of the proble ‘we are to account for this derived ra