I concluded the last post with the following:...We are left with two questions regarding aspects of this second conception of Derrida. First, what is a hermeneutics of suspicion? Second, is the point where reading is understood as mechanical that very point where one can resist a hermeneutics of suspicion?
I pursue these questions here. I will be moving towards an explication of the following, the result of which will set up a discussion of suspicion proper in post number 2.5:
For the phenomenology of religion, symbols are the manifestation of the sensible--in imagination, gesture, feeling--of a further reality, the expression of a depth which both shows and hides itself. What psychoanalysis encounters primarily as the distortion of elementary meanings connected with wishes or desires, the phenomenology of religion encounters primarily as the manifestation of a depth, or, to use the word immediately, leaving for later a discussion of its content and validity, the revelation of the sacred.
-Freud and Philosophy, 7
What is a hermeneutics of suspicion? Ricoeur introduces this term in opposition to a hermeneutic project he advocates--that of a hermeneutics of revelation or restoration--so will obviously have to reconstitute how this opposition is introduced. However, we must not cease to overlook the following fact in doing so: this opposition is immensely articulated, and cannot just be used wherever and whenever. Even Eve Sedgwick, in reformulating this opposition as "paranoid reading" and "reparative reading," sometimes succumbs to the ease with which such a distinction can be applied. It is a sign of just how complex establishing this difference is that Freud, who in an exemplary manner perches himself upon it according to Ricoeur, would merit several hundred pages of analysis: one constantly alternates between or stands on both sides of the difference, and so finding it and separating out what is suspicious from what is restorative requires looking again and again at a particular discourse. It never means resting content with labeling a thinker as generally suspicious or not.
For what is crucial is that this opposition is descriptive for Ricoeur first and foremost: despite his advocacy for a hermeneutics of restoration, he does not deny that a hermeneutics of suspicion is an extremely enlightening and often very necessary hermeneutic. This is why he distinguishes suspicion from skepticism: skepticism has less necessity historically than suspicion, if it has it at all. For one can be skeptical at any time with what needs to be interpreted, while one only remains suspicious if one is provoked by something within what is read. We will return more to this distinction momentarily, but it is clear from this that any proscriptive function of the fundamental distinction between the two hermeneutics comes after we understand its descriptive function: if this were not the case, Ricoeur would be equating suspicion and skepticism (that is, denying all determinateness to the object of suspicion), which would contradict his own notions about what constitutes suspicion. Thus, Ricoeur's characterization of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as practitioners of a hermeneutics of suspicion is not so much a grouping of various thinkers and/or readers under the heading of "suspicious" in order to dismiss (at least) their approach and (at most) them themselves and their followers, as announcing a necessity we can see both in the intellectual affinity of these interpreters (whether it be in their metaphysics, their ethics, their teachers, their specialties, the positions of their opponents, etc.) in history.
Noting this, we can begin by outlining this restorative hermeneutics of Ricoeur. It has its urgency in the status of our thinking about language. More and more, he says, we believe that language determines what can be done in the world. At the least, it is clear that language is crucial in determining what can be thought. Now, there is a particular region of language that becomes crucial in deciding whether and/or how this determination will proceed, and to what extent: the region where what is said has a double meaning. We say "double" instead of simply "more than one" to ward off the conclusion that Ricoeur means an area of language where meaning is just generally vague: what Ricoeur is getting at is that there is a region of language where two (or more) meanings have a claim to being meaningful in a genuine way, each to the exclusion of the other (or others). He calls what falls into this region "symbols," and it is clear that it is solely with symbols that interpretation must deal. For if meaning is not double in this way, if a phrase has a singular source of genuineness, even if it is not clear it will not provoke a decision among possibilities as to where it crucially gets its meaning from and thus to what this meaning should properly apply. Indeed, one can always dispute how something said should get applied or mean. But only when the meaning gets its character from the disputation itself, such that what is disputed over is not merely two or more meanings but two or more forms of the way meaning will be constituted, so that the entire work in question must be determined by the way one deals with this dispute--only then does a symbol appear and only then, when a symbol appears, is an interpretation needed. In other words, there is a general order in which a discourse proceeds to mean, and when we encounter the possibility of multiple orders we encounter a symbol--that is, no longer normal discourse, which usually only has one order. Tone provides a good illustration: when something sarcastic is written, for example (that is, when we cannot hear how it is uttered), we suddenly have the possibility of shifting the orders in which the sentence means, because the singular nature of the way the discourse was proceeding has split. Here interpretation is confronted with a symbol. Or, to use another, more hilarious (but actually more accurate) example, say I see a sign in the south of Boston, as I did the other day: "Chinese Spaghetti Factory." Here it isn't a tone that is really at issue--a whole register of discourse is not in play--but the effects are just as total or determinative, and therefore require a decision. For we can obviously take this sign in two ways, depending on the emphasis we lend the writing: looking at the sign, we either see a Chinese Spaghetti Factory, or a Chinese Spaghetti Factory. That is, either the sign designates a factory where Chinese people make spaghetti--that is, the classic pasta that we might find in Italy--or it designates a factory where a random group of workers from all sorts of backgrounds make Chinese spaghetti--that is, something like the noodles we might find in China. The last interpretation is a bit of a reach, but we see at least that the possibility is there, since what is at play in the sign is not just the register of the discourse but the whole possibility each word in the sentence has to mean, when their senses are combined and taken together. In other words, the function of this utterance as a symbol (which should be more condensed: they do not usually have the form of a phrase but a word, like "evil"--here I am just trying to illustrate) makes many linguistic elements other than the symbol proper shift in their signification--because what gets decided upon is a whole way things can come to mean (which is larger or more encompassing than any particular instance of meaning). The word "Factory," which seems pretty external to the symbol, is a good indication of this: even if it is external to the symbol, its meaning is bound up in the decision that is made with respect to it. The factory taken in the first sense, with the emphasis upon Spaghetti and not on Chinese, gives us an indication that the factory is a spaghetti factory foremost--and not a Chinese-owned factory, which is what would be designated if the emphasis would alternate. In other words, the factory shifts between being a factory defined by what it makes and a factory defined in terms of its ownership. In looking at the symbol, then, I have to decide about more than the right way to read the sentence; I am deciding not just the way a few words should signify. I am also deciding between two possibilities anything in the sentence--even if other words should be added onto it later--has of meaning.. Again, this is to come down on more than just the correctness of a statement or even the context (to a certain, but significant, extent): what has double meanings can be wrongly expressed or invalid or absurd (I have refrained from mentioning the possibility the sign allows: a factory that makes pasta out of people from China!?!).
But now we come to something important. When a symbol is encountered and interpretation of it begins, how should we conceive of the work that is done to bring one sense about instead of another? We must note that this is ultimately the question that leads Ricoeur to the distinction between restorative and suspicious hermeneutics, because it suggests how this work can occur in a particular direction--one which must lie beside other possible ones. However, we are now only tracking the way that a restorative hermeneutics proceeds along, and must confine the question's power to this particular sphere. How should we conceive of the effort a restorative hermeneutics uses to bring one sense out of a symbol rather than another? In what does this work of decision between senses consist? To answer a bit schematically, it consists in entering into the multiple meanings or senses and isolating one as that which is authoritative and originary. In short, one decides between senses on the basis of originariness. Now, this does not mean (of course) that one hears in the words that sense which came first, or even entirely that sense which most deeply resounds in the words and which makes the others possible. The former is too reductive of originariness, the second, not necessarily most significant when it comes down to a criterion for choosing and the work needed to be done. Rather, the sense that is originary is that sense from which all other meanings become deviations in some respect. If we isolate one sense, and if the others can be explained in terms of it, it will be more encompassing and thus more primary (in a non-chronological way).
We will elaborate on this in the following, but now we reach the most crucial question: what does this work in turn determine the mode of that which is to be interpreted--the symbol? How does the symbol function for this work? In a hermeneutics that seeks to recover or restore the originary and primordial, the symbol becomes a manifestation of the originary. In other words, the set of words that has a double meaning has its double meaning because of the originary sense. The crucial thing here, however, is not that the meaning springs from, as it were, the originary sense, but that it gets its doubleness--it appears as something (say, a set of words) that, if we look into it, can be said in another very determinate way--it gets this double appearance from out of that sense (among the others) that is originary. The originariness itself brings about a doubleness. It is in this way that the doubleness manifests or reveals the originary. Revelation: this is seeing the doubled constitution of symbols as due to what in this doubleness has (the symbol's, and thus as well as the doubleness' own) originary sense. It is thus that the work of recovery proceeds: it recovers what is originary and asserts it as the origin of what it manifests. Ricoeur used a wonderful expression late in his life to give some sense of this, and though it was formulated with regard to a larger and more encompassing object (art in general), it can apply here: he speaks of "a species with one single individual." Here, finding what is originary is finding what makes the individual a species--and thus what makes any particular manifestation the manifestation of some more original more unified general sense. But (and here is the real point of the expression) this occurs in such a way that there is nothing other than an individual to make the species out of--there is no other thing in which the species instantiates itself except the manifestation. That is, unless the species deviates from being this particular species. In symbols, this deviation does occur (there are two meanings that manifest themselves), and so the work of asserting that it is indeed a deviation (it has its source only in one--that is, a species) has to be undertaken.
Now that we somewhat understand what a hermeneutics that recovers is, we can see what suspicion is. It has to do both with that criterion with which it makes its interpretive decisions about the symbol, and with what applying this criterion presupposes about the modality of the symbol itself. (I'll proceed to this in the next post.)
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