The Neurohermeneutics of suspicion. A theoretical approach

Abstract

In this paper we draw back to Ricœur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, considered as an act of mistrustful interpretation based on intersubjectivity and aiming at disclosing latent and hidden meanings in the literary text. In our opinion Ricœur’s theoretical frame is relevant for present-day neurocognitive studies about literature, with regard to the issues of embodiment, bodily simulation and interpretation of textual latent meanings hidden beyond the manifest ones. Ricœur’s practice of sus­picion is one of the two poles of our present inquiry about literary text, while the second is our neurohermeneutic approach (Gambino & Pulvirenti 2018; 2019). In the perspective of what we here define as neurohermeneutics of suspicion, the reader becomes an interpreter, questioning the text with regard to its multilayered surface features as marking inferential clues unveiling secondary meanings. The meaning-making process depends on a creative act of the reader’s imagination em­bodying the mental (re-)construction of the situation described by a text. Therefore, suspicious interpreting does not rely in either the text, the author, the reader or the cultural and cognitive context, but in their complex and dynamic relationship, pivoting around the common embodied faculties of being a human. We claim that particularly in the postcritical venture, Ricœur’s hermeneutics, may be helpful in refiguring the pleasure of deciphering the fictional worlds of literature, challenging the reader to ‘play’ with the literary text intended as a terra incognita of inexhaustible multiple meanings.