Toward revisioning Ricoeur's hermeneutic of suspicion in other spaces and cultures

Abstract

In this paper I wish to examine a contemporary response to an important debate in the “science” of hermeneutics—“the art of rightly understanding the speech, chiefly in written form, of another.”1 The 20th century has witnessed what elsewhere has been termed “a profound radicalization of the understanding of texts” inasmuch as hermeneutics—the programmatic of interpretation and all that it had hitherto supposed about the nature and relation of text and its meaning—is itself problematized. The site of the contestation has been language, understood in the broadest possible sense of the medium that functions to convey meaning, textual and otherwise. A variety of responses, maturing into formida..