8. THE POSTMODERNIST HERMENEUTICS OF SUSPICION

    In academic circles, the postmodernist movement is propelled by a hermeneutics of suspicion.  To expose a will to power at the core of appeals to authority in any shape or form, this hermeneutics encodes an interiorized interrogatory stance without licencing an endless questioning that would reduce dialogue to meaningless babble.  As a critical apparatus, it replaces the pretense that the use of reason provides a detached, disinterested, dispassionate and god-like perspective on language, experience and reality with analyses of the workings of language which show the impossibility of escaping entirely from the formative power of everyday language on our longings, passions, desires, perceptions, imagination, motives, intentions, purposes and aspirations. 

    Since no pure beginning is possible, postmodernist critics view the formative power of everyday language as the literary legitimation of a hidden will to power which propelled the western literary tradition.  To ensure that they do not re-inscribe authority in their own texts and utterances, they limit themselves to suspicion of that formative power.  By extension, they assume that they do not replace the stance inherent in “-isms” with yet another stance, and they absolve themselves of any need to transform the anxiety of authorship into a re-envisioning of the human quest.

    My experience as a Catholic priest has evoked in me an almost compulsive suspicion of authority.  But the postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion can only speak in a hollow voice of prophetic protest against the violence it exposes.  In marked constrast, the protests of Israel's great prophets were generated by metaphors which transformed the longing for intimacy into a realizable quest.  The resulting moral discourse is designed to evoke that longing and delineate the quest in a way that speaks for itself.  It makes no claim to speak with authority.

       (Addendum:  The advertisement which celebrates Budweiser beer's "drinkability" is a striking illustration of the "hollow voice" of the postmodernist hermeneutics of suspicion.  Loosely translated, "drinkability" means "One can drink it."  As an advertisement, however, the hollow center invites all beer drinkers to fill it with their understanding of the term.  In so doing, the platitudinous term allows them to pretend that they are taking part in a serious dialogue concerning something dear to their heart.  As an added bonus, some who enter the dialogue may do so with a distinctively postmodernist irony.  In hidden ways, this irony always disguises a stance of superiority.)