Hermeneutics of Suspicion

ABSTRACT
This article explores the meanings of imagined, secret and hidden
wealth that followers of conspiracy theory account for on different
sides of the moral compass, as bad and good. Conspiracy theory, a
strand of intellectual practice exacerbated by the recent crisis in
Greece, calls for exploring hidden wealth assets, while conspiracy’s
mirror-image, transparency, becomes central in the understanding
of wealth in this conundrum. Through three stories, that of Artemis
Sorras – a self-proclaimed trillionaire, of an anti-Semitic book and
of conspiracist publishers in Greece, I examine the centrality of
(un)accountable wealth in imaginations of peoples’ presents and
pasts. I explore narratives of wealth in conspiracist discourse
trajectories, showing how wealth can play a role in imagined
allegiances and political practices. A focus on conspiracy theory
allows an exegesis of how obscure narratives of wealth are
shaping the ways in which people conceptualize economic crisis.
Notions of accountability and secrecy are central to their (and our)
understandings of wealth – and are laden with contradictions,
according to diverse paths of moralizing the past. An anthropology
of conspiracy theory allows scaling narratives of wealth from the
microhistories of money flows to the political economy of crisis.

Bu makalede, okurun edebi metnin sesine kulak vermesi yahut da bu sesi göz ardı etmesinin edebi metnin anlamının oluşmasına nasıl etki ettiği ‘güven ve şüphe hermenötiği’ kavramları eşliğinde ele alınacaktır. Buna göre, bir metni gerçekten anlamaya çabalayan bir okurun samimi olarak üstlenmesi gereken rol, iyi niyetini elden bırakmadan metnin kendisine bir şeyler söylemesine izin vermektir. Okurun bu konumu, metnin kendisine bir şeyler söylemesine engel olan şüpheci bir tavrın uzağındadır. Ancak metnin dili ile okur arasındaki bu ilişki, körü körüne bir güvene dayanmaktan ziyade, ayrıca saf bir naifliğe de düşmeyen bir pozisyondur.

Merold Westphal wrote the book Suspicion & Faith (1998) to explain that although modern atheists used the hermeneutics of suspicion to critique religious motives, their arguments can aid Christians in a devotional form of self-examination. Westphal claimed that the 'masters of suspicion' often utilized a deeply biblical logic that is reminiscent of the prophetic polemics against false religion. In this article, the author adds to these reflections by pointing to the Adversary from the Book of Job as one who embodies the hermeneutics of suspicion. The author contends that, like the critiques of modern atheists, the Adversary's question 'Does Job fear God for nothing?' (1:9b) can serve as a tool for self-examination and moral development. The Book of Job shows how he asks critical questions about Job's motives for religious piety by taking advantage of the logical groundwork of the prologue. This dialogue highlights the significance of Job's integrity and his commitment to virtue without the need for incentive, but at the same time, it also encourages readers to doubt his motives through a pattern of doubt that is integral to the narrative. The first section of this article examines Suspicion & Faith and discusses its approach to modern atheism. Then, in the second section, the author engages in an exegetical analysis of Job 1-2, with special attention to the prologue's logical groundwork and motif of doubt. The article concludes with a theological reflection on how the hermeneutics of suspicion can augment Christian practice.

The claim that the Earth is flat (Flat Earth theory, or FET) has recently
become a popular, Internet-based conspiracy theory. In addition to creating digital content in the form of websites, social media accounts, podcasts, and YouTube videos, FET supporters (or Flat Earthers) have also organized international conferences and even launched an FET-oriented dating site. While it is difficult to determine how many people sincerely believe FET, its very existence—at a time when probes have been sent to every planet of our solar system—is perplexing. Is FET a nostalgic attempt to revive the religious cosmology of our ancestors? Or is it simply the product of scientific illiteracy? Due to the absurdity of FET’s central propositions, serious scholarship on the topic is lacking. Most explanations focus on the psychology of the theory’s proponents. Supporters of FET are often likened to Creationists, and the theory itself is often equated with religious claims about the natural world. However, it is far from clear that FET is necessarily linked to any one religious doctrine or religious epistemological approach. In this study, I argue that current explanations of FET are not based on an adequate understanding of the differences between religious and scientific
epistemology; as such, they fail to grasp the epistemic shifts that have
made it possible for this belief to thrive today.

[Proofs; please cite published version] In recent years, some prominent scholars have been making a surprising claim: examining literary texts for hidden depths is overblown, misguided, or indeed downright dangerous. Such examination, they’ve warned us, may lead to the loss of world Heidegger warned of (Gumbrecht), to the world-denying metaphysics Nietzsche warned of (Nehamas), or to the suspicious form of hermeneutics Ricoeur warned of (Best, Marcus, Moi). This paper seeks to suggest that, though the concerns are understandable, there’s ultimately nothing to worry about. The fact that Nietzsche himself happily used metaphors of surface and depth suggests that they are not, in fact, metaphysically fraught. The fact that it’s possible to appreciate surfaces at the same time as depths means that there’s no real danger of losing the world. And as for depth-talk turning us into suspicious hermeneuts, that would happen only if we made two fallacious assumptions: first, that all depths are meanings; second, that all hidden features are in a text by accident. But since plenty of authors hide things deliberately, and since what’s hidden often has nothing to do with propositional content, both assumptions are profoundly mistaken.  Meanwhile, the surface/depth metaphor is the only thing that adequately captures the phenomenology of reading, especially when it comes to misdirection-based, hermetic, enigmatic, ironic, or satirical texts, where special activity on our part prompts a sudden leap to a radically different mode of understanding. And unlike its rivals, the surface/depth metaphor reflects a real asymmetry: depths explain surfaces, but not vice versa; surfaces are available without depths, but not the other way around. We need the metaphor, and we need to stay open to hidden depths as we read. As long as we don’t come in with terrible assumptions, nothing bad will happen to us, and plenty of good things will. It’s perfectly safe to go back in the water.

Jacques Derrida’s hauntology gives meanings to the avant-garde comic Here, initially published in RAW magazine. The specter would arise, preceded by the classical Ars Memoriae, within the modern Camera Obscura, intending to capture the whole experience into a single room, such as Here. By inverting this capture machine into a spectral projector, contemporary suspicion is unleashed: Psychoanalysis decodes its inter-generational hieroglyph through the notions of the crypt and the ghost, while Marxist oikonomia cuts up McGuire’s collages through spectrality of value and commodity fetishism as a fantasy-dreamlike manifestation, in the eyes of Derrida, forever indiscernible.

Horace’s Ode 1.12 is commonly thought to be alluding to the wedding between Augustus’ nephew C. Claudius Marcellus and Augustus’ daughter Julia in 25 B.C.E., but there are equally good poetic reasons for reading the poem instead as alluding to the young Marcellus’ demise in the last quarter of 23 B.C.E. and see it in direct dialogue with the epicedia for Marcellus composed by Virgil and Propertius. The present paper reviews the evidence for either dating and proposes that the poem actively resists and at the same time engenders historicist interpretations by virtue of lyric’s ability to create its own historical temporalities. As a poem touching upon the thorny issue of the acceptability of imperial succession in a period when Augustus’ life was in danger, Ode 1.12 can be read as actively engaged in a hermeneutic “conspiratorial” game with its readers, prompting them to question or imagine allusions to contemporary events at a time of utmost political instability.

This is my first conference presentation from 1995.  I defend Merold Westphal, my mentor at Fordham University, who has developed a hermeneutics of suspicion the purpose of which was to try to bring the noetic effect of the fall  to bear on our epistemology (knowing abilities). 
"In a 1991 article, Alvin Plantinga mentioned that the effect of sin upon the cognitive faculties is a curious but important question for epistemology.  Coincidentally, that same year, Merold Westphal's essay, "Taking St. Paul Seriously: Sin as an Epistemic Category" appeared.  Westphal's article dealt with the noetic effects of sin upon our cognitive faculties,  just what Plantinga had ordered.  Since then, Westphal has written other pieces, including his book, Suspicion and Faith, trying to demonstrate the similarities between Marx, Nietzsche and Freud's hermeneutics of suspicion and Paul's suspicion of sin.  However, Westphal's work has received little notice from the Reformed Epistemology camp, and William Hasker rejected Westphal's project as fiedeistic and destructive.
  Westphal's project deserves a better hearing than it has received.  His work provides helpful bridges of thought between Christian and atheist philosophers, social and epistemological philosophers, and analytic and continental, (even postmodern) philosophers.  The purpose of this essay is to promote Westphal's central claim in the above-mentioned articles, namely, that "for the Christian philosopher, sin should be an essential epistemological category..."  First, I will lay out Westphal's project.  Second, I will respond to William Hasker's objections (which I take to be typical objections) to Westphal's project.  And Third, I will conclude with a few comments about skepticism and the doing of epistemology.

The article discusses the basic concepts of Janusz Sławiński’s O opisie that are important for Polish literary studies in the wider context of the current discussion on the need to abandon the linguistic approach to literature in search of other ways to better understand the meaning of the work. Doubts expressed by Toril Moi in her book Revolution of the Ordinary regarding the analysis of texts from a traditional textual perspective become a pretext for revising some of the assumptions made by the structuralist school regarding the categories of description formulated, among others, by researchers such as Sławiński and Roland Barthes.

This paper analyses the semiotics of the Easter Sunday suicide attacks on churches and luxury sea -front hotels in Sri Lanka and the Weaponization of religion in this multi-faith and multicultural island.  As there is no history or motive for local Muslims to attack Christians since both these religious communities are minorities in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka, and given the economic targets of the crime,  it is clear that external parties  and networks are promoting ethno-religious divisions in the strategically located island in order to covertly further their security agendas, as well as, a  Cold War in the Indian Ocean against China and the rise of Asia. The narrative of Christian–Muslim conflict is a Euro–American one that does not mesh with local history and does not have traction in Sri Lanka, but may provide clues to the external parties that staged the highly sophisticated logistics operation of simultaneous bombings in disparate locations.

Critical sociology suggests that taste judgments are not independent of the social, as actors use them to claim social value. This article demonstrates that this critical perspective has gained currency among laypersons, transforming everyday struggles over cultural evaluation. I discuss the new discursive category ‘farterism’, which emerged in Israel in the 1990s to denounce vain pretence and became ubiquitous in everyday evaluation. I analyse online user-generated reviews on films and restaurants alongside broadsheet newspaper articles to explore how this category is used in different contexts by different actors, which aesthetic surface characteristics are most associated with it and why, and how farterism critique reshapes the relationship between lay judgments and established market (prices) and field/art-world (status) hierarchies. Farterism critique is often used to fend off symbolic violence, but cultural elites use it too, despite their interest. I discuss the implicit ethic behind farterism critique, and its connections with recent transformations of capitalism.

This article explores the relation between suspicion and expertise in the context of activist investigations of offshore corruption. I reconstruct one investigation of alleged corruption in the Azerbaijani oil sector, conducted by a British organization called Global Witness, to explore how suspicion is learned and practised in the face of impenetrable offshore secrecy. For these detectives of global capital, suspicion is both a tool for arriving at an understanding of offshore corporate networks and an orientation that helps them overcome the limits of this understanding, allowing them to make political claims that go beyond what is strictly afforded by evidence and libel law. Extending recent anthropological scholarship that revises the disciplinary emphasis on truth and certainty as the mainstays of expert knowledge, I argue that investigative expertise provides imprecise and suspicious understandings of its objects that are useful despite, or even because of, the ambivalence and suspicion it entails.

Published in: Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, Simon Schleusener, Eds.: Poetic Critique: Encounters with Art and Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021 (pp.175-201).
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110688719-013/html
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688719-013

This paper shows how persecution is a condition that binds each in an ethical obligation. Persecution is functionally defined here as an impinging, affective relation, one that is neither mediated by reason nor open to apology. The works of Sigmund Freud help illuminate the psychological mechanism responsible for impeding rational transparency in delusions of persecution and super-egoical moral demands. Similar to Freud who employs what Paul Ricoeur has called a " hermeneutics of suspicion " to interrogate the status of a fully knowing subject, I contend that Emmanuel Lévinas's work on the ethical subject is useful for developing a " hermeneutics of trust " in an ambivalent ontological condition that is unavoidably ethical. By thinking Freud and Lévinas together, I show how the commitment to total mastery of an unknowable ego leads to a persecutory relation, yielding moralities that are unconcerned with injuring the other in the name of that which is judged as good. In answer to this ethical dilemma, I propose that a turn toward relational ethics and an intentionality of search offers traces of a morality where differences are preserved and thus prevent the persecution of the other for one's own moral fulfillment.

The region of South Asia has always been highly important in the global politics because of its sensitive geographical location. India and Pakistan are two major countries of this region, which came into being as a result of the division of Sub-Continent in the year of 1947. Both India and Pakistan have remained unable to have cordial relationship with each other due to various issues. The relationship between India and Pakistan has been marked by suspicion, hatred and distrust. Tense and hostile situation has been existing between India and Pakistan since 1947, which has resulted in three wars and various crises between them. In May 1998, both India and Pakistan had tested their nuclear devices and the region of South Asia became a nuclear flashpoint. Although India and Pakistan are two traditional rival states but both have also experienced such occasions when they became successful to hold peace talks and conclude various agreements to resolve different issues. But this situation has not been long lasting and suspensions in the peace process further enhanced suspicion and mistrust on both sides. The objective of this paper is to analyze various issues between India and Pakistan in historical perspective and highlight those efforts which have been made by the policy makers of both states to lessen the tension.

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Abstract: Realist and Marxist critiques of humanitarian intervention are distinctively materialistic in scope. The IR literature has already described this scepticism as a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, a term associated with the work of Paul Ricoeur, which aims to unearth the intervenors’ material and geopolitical interests hypocritically hidden behind the pretext of humanitarianism. The article first notes the decontextualised misappropriations of the term as an iconic and omnipotent instrument of doubt, as well as the limitations of the social constructivist response on the matter. By contextualising Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion as developed in his life work, the article then calls for an extension of critique from a hermeneutics of suspicion to a hermeneutics of naïveté. Applied in the critique of the ideology of humanitarian intervention, the article thus calls for a shift of focus from the examination of the distorting (Marxism, realism) and legitimising (social constructivism) functions of this ideology to its integrating function that has allowed the evocation of humanitarian principles as international norms, and uncritically vindicates this arrangement. The article proposes that this hermeneutical detour could allow critique to proceed to a greater analytical depth, opening up a set of critical questions.

At first, the Pentecostal movement made no distinction between genders in the ministry. Anyone anointed by the Spirit was allowed to minister, whether to pray for the sick, testify about an encounter with God, preach or teach. The emphasis was not on the person of the one ministering, but on the Spirit equipping and empowering the person. Due to Pentecostals’ upward mobility and alliance with evangelicals in order to receive the approval of the society and government since the 1940s, women’s contribution to the ministry faded until in the 1970s some Pentecostals with an academic background started debating about Pentecostal hermeneutics; questioning also the omission of women from ministry. Although many Pentecostals still read the Bible in a fundamentalist manner, the article proposes a hermeneutical strategy—in accordance with the way early Pentecostals interpreted the Bible—that moves from the experience with the Spirit to the Bible, allowing one to experience the confusion and c...

Marx and Nietzsche are often compared as practitioners of a hermeneutic of suspicion.  I want to pursue this comparison by focusing on an overlooked similarity between the two.  In strangely similar passages, Marx (in Capital) and Nietzsche (in the Genealogy of Morals) introduce explicitly theatrical scenarios into the course of their discussions, complete with what Marx calls dramatis personae, where we witness a descent into a workshop (in some sense underground) in order to learn the secrets of production - the production, in both cases, of value.  But neither scenario conforms to the structure of the discovery of a concealed truth – in fact, each challenges this structure directly.  By looking at the specific nature of these theatrical descents, we can come to a better understanding of the task of the philosopher in both Nietzsche and Marx, as well as the distinctive position of historical knowledge within a hermeneutics of suspicion.

Common sense hand proofs for the claim that writers cannot control everything they do, and that specific intentions do not attach to everything we do. The argument avoids commitment to any particular literary theories. This is an extract from Trevor Pateman, Nabokov's Dream (2021)

publicada inicialmente en el magazín RAW. El espectro surgiría, precedido por el Ars Memoriae del mundo clásico, con la cámara oscura moderna que pretende captar la totalidad de la experiencia en una sola habitación, como Here. Al invertirse esta máquina de captura en proyector de espectros, se desata la sospecha contemporánea: el psicoanálisis descodifica la historieta a través de las nociones de cripta y fantasma, mientras la oikonomia marxista desmenuza los collages de McGuire como manifestación fantástico-onírica, a ojos derridianos, por siempre indiscernible.

By triangulating Frederick Ahl’s contribution to the study of Roman poetry with earlier modern and later postmodern studies of Roman history and literature, this article explores the controversial scholarly suggestion that Horace’s poem of the “Golden Mean,” Odes 2.10, is implicated in a conspiracy to topple Augustus in 23 BCE.  Detecting a prefiguration of Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” in Nisbet and Hubbard’s and Ronald Syme’s prosopographical treatments of the poem, the article exploits rumors that Syme was involved in intelligence and posits a model of the text as an active site of ongoing intrigue, comprising codes and aliases in the fashion of a ‘kerygma’ and demanding a tactical or ‘partisan’ approach to ancient literature.

In the present essay, I examine truth and trust as socially embedded co-constructions. To ground my analysis, I focus on Julián Fuks's A resistência (2015), a novel that addresses Brazil's dictatorial past (1964-1985) while alluding to contemporary and future concerns. Through close readings of Fuks's metafictional novel, I examine the ways in which trust develops in tandem with doubt and suspicion. This focus sheds light on how attention to trust is crucial for both lectoral engagement and the democratic processes of discussion and consensus.