Seditious Suspicion: Toward a Hermeneutics of Resistance :: Essays Papers

Seditious Suspicion Toward a Hermeneutics of ResistanceIn his book Freud and the Philosophers, the hermeneuticist Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase the school of doubt to describe the method shared by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Their common intention, he claims, was the decision to look upon the whole of consciousness primarily as false consciousness taking up again, each in a different manner, the problem of Cartesian doubt, to carry it to the very heart of the Cartesian stronghold, (Ricoeur, 33) that is, applying doubts caustic and destructive epistemological impulse to the internal world. Their achievement lies in the introduction of a profoundly impudent process of interpretation. Contrary to either hermeneutics understood as the recollection of meaning, (Ricoeur, 35) that is, any idea of interpretation as a proper listening, the masters of suspicion saw the act of exegesis as one of deciphering, demystification. A contentedness must be more than simply heard reception is not equivalent to comprehension. Signification, by this logic, is a coded affair, and without the cipher it will be received but not understood. Ricoeur makes a point to draw a lancinating line between suspicion and skepticism here there is no question that symbols have a message to convey. Suspicion is a tearing off of masks, an interpretation that reduces disguises. (Ricoeur, 30) Where the skeptic allows the suspicious impulse to run unchecked, suspicion works to clear the horizonfor a new reign of Truth. The radical skeptics childish destructiveness is untempered by a creative, inventive act the invention of an art of interpreting (Ricoeur, 33). How, then, could this hermeneutics be use to film? It seems a strange realm for the school of suspicion to find converts. The suspension of disbelief would seem to be wholly at odds with the sharp and merciless blade of doubt. And yet, since The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, certain films, generally from the genre of science-fiction, have been whittling away at our nave faith in the real and the human beings of our neighbors. If these films were to be gathered together as a genre (and a recent spate of such movies indicates that Hollywood has begun to recognize the appeal of such a grouping), we might call it the cinema of suspicion. For the most part these movies, like Seconds or Total Recall, rarely lead us to question the very existence of reality. They near never advocate quiescence in the face of the deceit of our senses.