The chapters in the previous section discussed how war is a lingering and also problematic reference point in the works of those who lived through it. How it should be understood, represented and emotionally processed remains unresolved. Just as trauma is all the more disturbing when it goes unnamed in a life or text, the Second World War inflects post-war experience and writings when it is not explicitly present. The chapters in this section discuss three men – Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur and Louis Althusser – who in many respects were very different from one another. Levinas was Jewish, and is best known for his work in ethics; Ricoeur was Christian, and is best known for his work in hermeneutics and narrative theory; and Althusser was a Marxist, and is probably best remembered today for killing his wife. Yet all three have in common that they spent most of the Second World War as prisoners of war. When they returned from captivity they were profoundly changed; and each of them would go on to rank among the key thinkers of their generation. The issue here is: where are the traces of war in their post-war thinking and writing? I begin with the case of Paul Ricoeur.

Whose life story is it anyway?

Ricoeur was born in to a Protestant family in 1913. His father was killed only two years later in the First World War, so war played a defining part in his life from its earliest stages. He proved to be a brilliant student and was on the verge of an academic career when he was conscripted in 1939, despite his pacifist convictions. He was taken prisoner in 1940 and spent the rest of the war as a POW. After the war he resumed his academic career, establishing himself as one of the most prolific and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. At a time when hermeneutics was out of fashion and largely misunderstood in France, his work in the area made him one of the world's leading thinkers in the philosophy of interpretation, rivalled only (perhaps) by Heidegger and Gadamer. His astonishingly wide-ranging writings dealt with virtually every area of importance in philosophy; and he also wrote hugely important work on narrative and its role in the construction of the self.