Hermeneutics of suspicion

"School of suspicion" (French: école du soupçon) is a phrase coined by Paul Ricœur in Freud and Philosophy (1965) to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche,[1] the three "masters of suspicion".[2] This school (also dubbed hermeneutics of suspicion in secondary literature) is defined as a balanced recognition and perception between "explanation" and "understanding" that validates expressions of a representation.[3]

Overview

Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his 1960 magnum opus Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode), offers perhaps the most systematic survey of hermeneutics in the 20th century, its title indicating his dialogue between claims of "truth" on the one hand and the processes of "method" on the other—in brief, the hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion. Gadamer suggests that, ultimately, in our reading we have to decide between one and the other.[4]:106–107

According to literary theorist Rita Felski, hermeneutics of suspicion is "a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths." Felski further writes:

[Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche] share a commitment to unmasking 'the lies and illusions of consciousness'; they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths ... Ricoeur's term has sustained an energetic after-life within religious studies, as well as in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields.[5]

Felski also notes that "The 'hermeneutics of suspicion' is the name usually bestowed on [a] technique of reading texts against the grain and between the lines, of cataloging their omissions and laying bare their contradictions, of rubbing in what they fail to know and cannot represent."[6] In that sense, it can be seen as being related to ideology critique. Felski has built on Ricœur's theory in outlining her influential theory of postcritique.[7]

Two converse hermeneutics

Ruthellen Josselson writes, "Ricoeur distinguishes between two forms of hermeneutics: a hermeneutics of faith which aims to restore meaning to a text and a hermeneutics of suspicion which attempts to decode meanings that are disguised."[8]

See also

References
  1. Ricoeur, Paul (2008) [1970]. Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation. Denis Savage (transl.). New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. p. 32. ISBN 978-8-12083305-0.
  2. Ricoeur, Paul (2008). pp. 33, 35.
  3. G. D. Robinson, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion: A Brief Overview and Critique, University of Toronto.
  4. Jasper, D., A Short Introduction to Hermeneutics (Louisville, KY & London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), pp. 106–107.
  5. Felski, Rita (2012). "Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion". M/C Journal. 15 (1). doi:10.5204/mcj.431.
  6. Felski, Rita (Autumn 2011). "Context Stinks" (PDF). New Literary History. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. 42 (4): 573–591. doi:10.1353/nlh.2011.0045.
  7. Giusti, F., "Passionate Affinities: A Conversation with Rita Felski", Los Angeles Review of Books, September 25, 2019.
  8. Josselson, Ruthellen (1 July 2004). "The Hermeneutics of Faith and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion" (PDF). Narrative Inquiry. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 14 (1): 1–28. doi:10.1075/ni.14.1.01jos. ISSN 1387-6740. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 February 2016.
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