The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: A Framework for My Intellectual and Creative Projects

The hermeneutics of suspicion, a term coined by Paul Ricoeur to describe the interpretive methods of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, provides a powerful lens for interrogating the intersections of meaning, power, and desire. My work across various disciplines—from psychoanalysis to digital humanities to ethics—engages deeply with this tradition, reframing its critical stance to interrogate contemporary cultural, psychological, and technological phenomena. Below, I explore how this approach threads through my projects, including Lacan’s four discourses, my cyborgian play The Authors of Silence, my ethics of cyborgian care, my Archive Fever blog on digital humanities (DH) and canonity, and my Health Humanities (HH) Center’s mission to redefine the humanities around psychoanalytically informed understandings of health.

Lacan's Four Discourses: Deconstructing Structures of Power

Lacan’s four discourses—the Master, the University, the Hysteric, and the Analyst—function as structural frameworks for understanding how language and desire mediate relationships of power and knowledge. Through a hermeneutics of suspicion, we can unearth the latent ideologies embedded within these discourses, revealing the ways they perpetuate systemic hierarchies and occlude subjective agency.

In my teaching and writing on this topic, I position Lacan’s discourses as both critical tools and objects of critique. For instance, the Master’s discourse enshrines authority, but its supposed mastery often conceals its dependence on the Other for legitimacy. Similarly, the Analyst’s discourse—the most subversive—functions as an interpretive mode that lays bare the unconscious truths within power structures. My work employs this framework to interrogate not only psychoanalytic practice but also broader cultural systems, from education to media, aligning Lacanian thought with the critical skepticism of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.

The Authors of Silence: Suspicion as Creative Praxis

My play, The Authors of Silence, explores themes of voice, absence, and the unspoken in both individual psyches and collective histories. Drawing from a hermeneutics of suspicion, the play attempts to deconstruct—destruct, to take apart, to analyze, and by doing so, reconstruct in a more conscious and health-directed way—the narratives that mask power dynamics within artistic, familial, cultural, historical, and political relationships. The characters wrestle with silence not as a void, but as a space teeming with repressed truths and potential subversion.

This dramatic exploration aligns with Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysical certainties, Freud’s uncovering of the repressed, and Marx’s exposure of economic ideologies. Silence in the play operates as both a symptom and a critique, revealing the gaps and inconsistencies in dominant discourses. By inviting the audience to confront these silences and give them voice, the play becomes an act of resistance against interpretive complacency.

Ethics of Cyborgian Care: Suspicion in the Posthuman Condition

In my development of an ethics of cyborgian care, I integrate the hermeneutics of suspicion with psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, particularly informed by Jean Laplanche’s work on transference, enigmatic signification, and embodiment. This framework interrogates the evolving relationship between humans and technology, resisting reductive techno-optimism and challenging the commodification of care in digital and cyborgian contexts. At its core, this ethics emphasizes the embodied nature of subjectivity and the transformative potential of relational complexity through the lens of transference.

Suspicion operates here as both a methodological and ethical stance. It calls for attentiveness to how online therapy platforms mediate—and often distort—human desires, relationships, and therapeutic processes. While marketed as tools for accessibility and efficiency, such platforms frequently replicate the Master’s discourse by imposing standardized frameworks of interaction, surveillance, and commodification. These systems risk privileging convenience and abstraction over the nuanced, embodied dimensions of psychoanalytic care.

Drawing on Laplanche’s theory of enigmatic signifiers, transference, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, my ethics of cyborgian care foregrounds the complexity of human relationality. It critiques how online therapy risks reducing the therapeutic encounter to a transactional model, undermining the transformative potential of transference and the embodied dynamics of the analytic setting. This framework advocates for practices that preserve the depth and ambiguity of human subjectivity, even in technologically mediated contexts.

By challenging dominant paradigms of care within the posthuman condition, this approach envisions a future where human-technology collaborations foster deeper relationality and ethical attentiveness, resisting the flattening tendencies of commodification and control.

Archive Fever Blog: Digital Humanities and the Politics of Canonity

Through my Archive Fever blog, I critically interrogate the cultural politics of archives and canon formation in the digital age. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of “archive fever,” this project examines how digital humanities reshapes foundational questions of authority, memory, and accessibility, while exposing the ideological underpinnings of such transformations.

The hermeneutics of suspicion is central to this work, as digital technologies—often celebrated for their democratizing potential—frequently perpetuate entrenched power structures. Digital platforms that aggregate, preserve, and disseminate knowledge may appear neutral, yet they often privilege dominant voices and narratives, marginalizing others and replicating the exclusions inherent in traditional canons. These dynamics reveal the subtle interplay between technological innovation and cultural hegemony, as digital humanities risks becoming complicit in reinforcing existing hierarchies rather than disrupting them.

My blog critiques these processes by advocating for a more inclusive and reflexive digital humanities. This includes interrogating the implicit biases within metadata standards, search algorithms, and archival practices that shape how histories are curated and remembered. The project emphasizes the ethical responsibility of digital humanists to foreground the interplay between memory, power, and technology, challenging the structural inequities embedded in both analog and digital archives.

By situating Archive Fever within the broader framework of cyborgian care, my work calls for an ethics that attends to the relational and contingent nature of memory. This involves embracing the complexities of digital archives as sites of tension—between preservation and erasure, visibility and invisibility, authority and resistance. In doing so, the blog seeks to reimagine the digital humanities not merely as a tool for preserving the past, but as a platform for fostering critical engagement with the politics of canonity in the present and future.

The HH Center: Health and the Humanities Through Psychoanalysis

At the core of my intellectual vision is the Health Humanities (HH) Center, a project that seeks to reimagine the humanities through a psychoanalytically informed understanding of health. Central to this vision is the application of the hermeneutics of suspicion—an approach that critiques the surface assumptions of both healthcare and contemporary psychoanalysis, exposing how each often perpetuates reductive frameworks that deny the complexity of the unconscious.

Freud’s insights into the unconscious provide a foundational critique of modern healthcare, which frequently marginalizes subjective and relational dimensions of well-being. However, this vision also applies the hermeneutics of suspicion to contemporary psychoanalysis, interrogating its commodification of humanism and its denial of the unconscious as a disruptive force. Contemporary psychoanalysis, as exemplified by Robert Stolorow’s “Intersubjectivity Theory,” positions itself as a palatable brand, substituting relational humanism for genuine psychoanalytic inquiry. By assuming that subjects are “always already” within a relational dynamic, Stolorow erases the developmental and unconscious processes that are essential for the emergence of a subject capable of authentic relationality.

Stolorow and Kohut

Heinz Kohut’s theories of narcissism and selfobject functions offer a crucial counterpoint. Kohut’s work emphasizes the necessity of selfobject experiences in fostering the psychological resilience required for individuals to relate beyond narcissistic structures. In contrast, Stolorow’s framework collapses the distinction between self and other, ultimately denying the analytic process’s transformative potential. As Jon Mills and others have argued, Stolorow’s theory is neither psychoanalytic nor genuinely contemporary; it is a superficial relationalism that fails to engage with the unsettling truths of the unconscious.

The HH Center situates itself as a corrective to these distortions, using the hermeneutics of suspicion to critique not only biomedical reductionism but also the commodified humanism that masquerades as psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary approach integrates psychoanalysis, philosophy, cultural critique, and the digital humanities to challenge prevailing paradigms and foreground the relational, embodied, and unconscious dimensions of health.

Building on my course, “Narrative Arts and Contemporary Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy,” the HH Center also critiques how narrative practices within psychoanalysis have been diluted to fit market-friendly frameworks. By reclaiming narrative as a space for engaging with the unconscious, the HH Center aims to restore the depth and complexity of psychoanalytic inquiry, resisting efforts to sanitize or commodify its insights.

In this reimagined framework, the humanities are not merely ancillary to medicine but serve as a critical site for exploring the power, memory, and desire that shape health and its meanings. The HH Center advocates for practices that embrace the unsettling, transformative potential of the unconscious, fostering an aspirational vision of health humanities that resists commodification and embraces complexity.

By centering psychoanalysis as a critical lens and drawing on rigorous theoretical foundations, the HH Center positions itself as a transformative force within both academic and clinical contexts, redefining the role of the humanities in health and emphasizing the necessity of the unconscious in understanding and fostering human well-being.

Conclusion: Suspicion as a Generative Force

Across these projects, the hermeneutics of suspicion functions not merely as a method of critique but as a vital force for reimagining foundational assumptions in health, the humanities, and psychoanalysis. By deconstructing discourses of power, interrogating the commodification of humanism, and reclaiming the disruptive truths of the unconscious, my work challenges reductive frameworks and opens new pathways for thought and creativity. Whether critiquing the digital turn in the humanities, exposing the limitations of contemporary psychoanalytic models, or rethinking health through the lens of relationality and embodiment, these efforts are united by a commitment to uncovering the hidden and destabilizing the given.

Suspicion, in this sense, becomes a tool for empowerment, fostering complexity and embracing the tensions that define our shared human condition. This work resists the flattening tendencies of commodification and invites a deeper engagement with the relational, embodied, and unconscious dimensions of existence. It is a project as urgent as it is necessary, offering a vision of change that is both critical and aspirational in our increasingly fragmented contemporary moment.