Comparative Epistemology of Suspicion: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and the Human Sciences

Abstract

ArgumentIn calling psychoanalysis a “school of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970, 32), Ricoeur marks at once its use in a disposition characteristic of modernity: the disposition of suspicion. Modernity gives rise to various forms of suspicion, to modern forms of ressentiment and practices of disciplining oneself (the suspicion of oneself) as well as to an epistemology of suspicion. In this essay, I shall analyze the epistemological function of suspicion – which as the “paradigm of clues” (Ginzburg 1988) becomes the leading paradigm of the human sciences in the last third of the nineteenth century – and its close interrelationship with the techniques of power. As I shall demonstrate through a comparative reading of psychoanalytical, literary, and criminological texts, the modern production of knowledge in the human sciences cannot be separated from the modern “micro-physics of power,” which for Foucault was established in the eighteenth century, and the technologies of the self. I shall situate the paradigm of clues within the framework of the modern disposition of suspicion in order to combine the epistemological reflections with an analysis of cultural history. Thus I will first examine the paradigm of clues from the perspectives of cultural theory (Foucault and Nietzsche) and semiotics (Peirce), in order to illuminate the structural unreliability of the episteme as well as the way it is closely linked to the techniques of power. In what follows, I will apply this view to Bertillon's photographic identification system, the psychoanalytical concept of the trace, and Kafka's short story The Burrow.

“I'm not sure I'm a nurse”: A hermeneutic phenomenological study of nursing home nurses' work identity

“…The third stage of analysis entailed a line‐by‐line examination of the text. Strowick () suggested that expressions used in speech may have hidden subtexts. These expressions may not directly constitute meaning, but they might indirectly indicate underlying issues.…”

Suspicious Minds

“…In the current climate of retrospection, however, as critics reflect on the intellectual legacy of recent decades and reassess methods of reading that have come to seem stale and unsurprising, the hermeneutics of suspicion is shifting from a mode of analysis to an object of analysis within literary studies. A style of interpretation that once seemed entirely selfevident and self-explanatory now finds itself squirming under the spotlight (Sedgwick 1997;Latour 2004;Strowick 2005;Best and Marcus 2009;Felski 2009;Love 2010). Why do so many scholars feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read?…”

“…In reality, suspicious reading has a larger, more variegated and more mundane history. As Elizabeth Strowick (2005) remarks, suspicion becomes a widely diffused interpretative method in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, manifested in various forms of knowledge that are organized around the mistrust of surface appearance and the reading of clues, such as criminology, psychoanalysis, and literature. While Ricoeur's (1970: 33) account of the hermeneutics of suspicion stresses its heroic, oppositional, nay-saying qualities ("these three masters of suspicion are .…”

‘I feel like a salesperson’: the effect of multiple‐source care funding on the experiences and views of nursing home nurses in England

“…The third stage of analysis entailed a line‐by‐line examination of the text. Strowick () explains that expressions used in texts and speech may have hidden subtexts. Such expressions themselves do not directly constitute meaning, but they can be indirect clues to underlying issues.…”