Chapter 6. The Hermeneutics of Suspicion [00:32:10]

Now in the passage I gave you, Freud says a very interesting thing, which is that after all, we have absolutely no objective evidence that the unconscious exists. If I could see the unconscious, it'd be conscious. Right. The unconscious, Freud is saying, is something that we have to infer from the way consciousness operates. We've got to infer something. We've got to figure out somehow how it is that consciousness is never completely uninhibited, never completely does and says what it wants to say. So the spin on consciousness for Freud is the unconscious.

Now someone who didn't fully believe Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, a very important modern philosopher in the hermeneutic tradition named Paul Ricoeur, famously said in the fourth passage on your sheet that these great precursors of modern thought--and particularly, I would immediately add, of modern literary theory--together dominate a "school of suspicion." There is in other words in Ricoeur's view a hermeneutics of suspicion, and "skepticism" or "suspicion" is a word that can also be appropriated perhaps more rigorously for philosophy as negativity. That is to say, whatever seems manifest or obvious or patent in what we are looking at is undermined for this kind of mind by a negation which is counterintuitive: that is to say, which would seem not just to qualify what we understand ourselves to be looking at but to undermine it altogether. And these tendencies in the way in which Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have been received have been tremendously influential. When we read Foucault's "What is an Author?" next time we'll return to this question of how Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have been received and what we should make of that in view of Foucault's idea that--well, not that there's no such thing as an author but that it's rather dangerous to believe that there are authors. So if it's dangerous to believe that there are authors, what about Marx, Nietzsche and Freud? Foucault confronts this question in "What is an Author?" and gives us some interesting results of his thinking. For us, the aftermath even precisely of the passages I have just quoted, but certainly of the oeuvre of the three authors I have quoted from, can to a large degree be understood as accounting for our topic--the phenomenon of literary theory as we study it. In other words, literary theory, because of the influence of these figures, is to a considerable degree a hermeneutics of suspicion recognized as such both by its proponents and famously--I think this is perhaps what is historically remote for you--by its enemies.

During the same period when I was first teaching this course, a veritable six-foot shelf of diatribes against literary theory was being written in the public sphere. You can take or leave literary theory, fine, but the idea that there would be such an incredible outcry against it was one of the most fascinating results of it. That is to say for many, many, many people literary theory had something to do with the end of civilization as we know it. That's one of the things that seems rather strange to us today from an historical perspective: that the undermining of foundational knowledge which seemed to be part and parcel of so much that went on in literary theory was seen as the central crucial threat to rationality emanating from the academy and was attacked in those terms in, as I say, at least six feet of lively polemics. All of that is the legacy of literary theory, and as I say, it arises in part from the element of skepticism that I thought it best to emphasize today.

Now I think that one thing Ricoeur leaves out, and something that we can anticipate as becoming more and more important for literary theory and other kinds of theory in the twenty-first century, is Darwin. That is to say, it strikes me that Darwin could very easily be considered a fourth hermeneut of suspicion. Of course, Darwin was not interested in suspicion but he was certainly the founder of ways of thinking about consciousness that are determined, socio-biologically determined: determined in the realm of cognitive science, determined as artificial intelligence, and so on. All of this is Darwinian thinking and, I think, increasingly will be central in importance in the twenty-first century. What will alter the shape of literary theory as it was known and studied in the twentieth century is, I think, an increasing emphasis on cognitive science and socio-biological approaches both to literature and to interpretive processes that will derive from Darwin in the same way that strands of thinking of the twentieth century derive from the three figures that I've mentioned.

But what all this gives rise to--and this brings me finally to the passages which you have on both sides of your sheet and which I don't want to take up today but just to preview--the passages from Henry James' Ambassadors from 1903, and from Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard from 1904. In other words, I am at pains to remind you that this is a specific historical moment in which, in a variety of ways, in each case the speaker argues that consciousness--that is to say, the feeling of being alive and being someone acting in the world--no longer involves agency: the feeling that somehow to be conscious has become to be a puppet, that there is a limitation on what we can do, imposed by the idea that consciousness is determined in ways that we cannot control and cannot get the better of, so that Strether in The Ambassadors and Yepihodov in The Cherry Orchard speak for a point of view which is a kind of partially well-informed gloom and doom that could be understood to anticipate texts that are much better informed, that we will be considering but nevertheless are especially important as an aspect of their historical moment. I want to begin the next lecture by taking up those passages. Please do bring them, and I will also be passing around Tony the Tow Truck and I'll give you a brief description of what the little children's book actually looks like, and then we will plunge in to the question "What is an author?" So I'll see you on Thursday.