A HERMENEUTICS OF RESILIENCE AND REPAIR

Author(s): Tracy Fessenden

Source: Religion & Literature , summer 2016, Vol. 48, No. 2 (summer 2016), pp. 167-173
Published by: The University of Notre Dame

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26377487

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 FORUM 167

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Branch, Lori. "The Rituals of Our Re-Secularization: Literature Between Faith an

edge." Religion & Literature 46, nos. 2-3 (Fall 2015): 9-33.
. "On the Religiousness of Criticism." In Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Sec
from Free Prayer to Wordsworth, 211-26. Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2006.
Caputo,John. On Religion. London: Routledge, 2001.
Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
Hervieu-Léger. Religion as a Chain of Memory. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 20
Robinson, Marilynne. Home. New York: Picador, 2008.
Smith, Christian. What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Goodf
Person Up. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011.

A HERMENEUTICS OF RESILIENCE AND REPAIR

Tracy Fessenden

It's good to be taking up Rita Felski's brilliant and generous book

pages of Religion & Literature, ajournai whose very title invites reflect
the bonds (re-ligare, to bind) that join us to and around what we read.
& Literature further insists on the givenness of a conjuncture too m
us have engaged in depleting critique to prove, in the way of finger-po
(literature as crypto-theology!), or to sever (no more crypto-theology!)
invites us to put divisiveness aside, to make room as readers for what s
moves, and sustains us.
Could there be a more wrenching irony than that the affect som
nursed and cultivated lor decades—skeptical, wary, arch, adversarial
pessimistic—should so nearly match the national mood that deliver
implausible 45th president? Implicit in Felski's call to broaden the sc
ends of our reading practice is the question of why so many of us
ourselves to a hermeneutics of suspicion for so long. If we can now
that there is "no inherent rigor or intrinsic radicalism" in critique
is it we convinced ourselves otherwise?
I can reach back to my own experience as a student in the 1980
90s, first in English at Yale and then in English and religious studie
University of Virginia. In English the hermeneutics of suspicion w
method and lingua franca; in religious studies it was also our object of

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 168 Religion de Literature

It was in religious studies, not English, that I first read Ricoeur, Ga

Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. Truth and Method and Being and Time
assigned in three or four classes each, so they were worth lugging
from year to year. Felski says she "pore [d] doggedly over Ricoeur's
(1), the hermeneutics of suspicion, in the course of writing The Lim
Critique. Poring over phrases was what I wish I'd had leave to do then, in
of pretending I'd mastered, impossibly, the doorstop tomes themsel
To grad students given to debilitating insecurities about how mu
how little we knew, rritinue offered the seductions of Wnnwincmess There's

a freedom and a whiff of danger in suspicion—Sapere aude, dare to know.

Critique conveyed a toughness our situation called for: we were hacking
into an old boy's network and softness wouldn't do. We were hyperarticulate
about our adversaries because we felt ourselves besieged. We grasped at tools
and methods for negotiating unwelcoming space. Suspicion formed in us a
compelling vigilance, a jittery alertness to a text's or author's or tradition's
complicities with the reigning order, imperceptible to the untutored eye.
Some of us recognize our younger selves in the new campus activism: the
cosmic breadth of our claims, our vigilant energy, our refusals to defer to
those who'd been around longer and knew things we didn't. There was a lot
we didn't know, but we were certain that being on the right side of history
would make up for a great deal.
The hermeneutics of suspicion, Felski says, marks "a style of interpre
tation driven by a spirit of disenchantment" (2). Ricoeur describes the
hermeneutics of snsnicion as a radical break from "traditional theories of

interpretation anchored in the study of religious texts" (32). In this se

projects of unmasking and demystifying make a late chapter in the sec
ization story of the profession of literature, and derive their energy and th
seeming inexorability from that plot. (It's a plot by which religious studies
also been furiously driven, trust me.) Literary study, I've argued elsewhere
one site where religion goes hiding in a secular age, and where religion
the same time conspicuously shown the door.1 As stealth religion, crit
affords an austere asceticism: a way of giving form to mistrust of commun
to the refusal of pleasure, to "merciless excoriation [sj of self" pursued
its name (10). As gatekeeper between literary studies and religion, crit
keeps literature from sliding into what Felski, with perhaps undue warines
calls "the abyss of a retrograde religion of art" (165).
If we weren't sure what to put under suspicion in the days of high theor
the canon made a reliable smoking gun. It's painful on any number of le
to observe that the academic study of literature did not require a great
of defending until the dead and superannuated white males, those bugb
of critique, ceded the franchise to the rest of us. Until then the literary ca

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 FORUM 169

and the literary academy enj

ing our way into the acade
by means of critique, did n
opposite: tenure-line jobs d
Still the hermeneutics of sus
of our own marginality. G
Feeling misunderstood mad
opacity, their inscrutability
It was in this environmen
Sedgwick that a hermeneut
neutics of repair as well. I
'Jane Austen and the Mast
name in skittish cases for th
it was Sedgwick who moved
Felski calls post-critical, th
refute, to gaze at from sever
seductive shimmer and fee
called for the banishing of
were dealing with their stu
all time is Sedgwick's answ
that under the sign of pol
to study the literature and
Shakespeare, Plato, and Lo

Alongside? Read any Sonnets latel

To invoke the Utopian bedroom
Roll over, Beethoven, and tell Tc

Tf rritirmp iq to Hp 1p\/p1pH cirrciinct an orY-lp** f-Hat

inadmissible or illegible, Sedgwick's example instructs, then there is truly

nowhere else than with the force of one's attachments to begin.
A minor qualm I have with actor-network theory is that it neither offers
nor requires any way of distinguishing between, say, speed bumps and son
nets as actors. An actor for Felski is anything that modifies a state of affairs
by making a difference. Newspapers can be actors; so can strawberries or
soap, crosswalks or floor plans, unreliable narrators or lousy bets, Plato or
Play-Dough. Any of these things might cause a state of affairs to change
course. A distinction that matters for the way that literature might cause us
to change course, and one that cuts through the supposed dichotomies of
text/context, work/world, art as the work of solitary genius/art as socially
produced, is the distinction between models of and models for, the patterns

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 170 Religion & Literature

we rest in and the patterns that move us toward possibility. "M

are found through the whole order of nature," says Clifford Gee
wherever there is a communication of pattern, such programs are, in
logic, required. Among animals, imprint learning is perhaps the m
ing example." But "models of linguistic, graphic, mechanical, natu
processes which function not to provide sources of information in
which other processes can be patterned, but to represent those pa
nrnrpccpc qc cnr»Vi to pvnrocc th#=»ir* cfriipfurp in an olfprnofnm» mprlmm a

much rarer": these are the sonnets rather than the speed bumps. But
net can sometimes act like a speed bump, and it's this "intertransposa
of models-of and models-for that allows us to yield to or stop for w
read, to let it direct or reroute or trip us toward possibility, and perhap
there to new models-of.3
I'm thinking of Geertz because Felski's account of post-critical read
"no longer a matter of gesturing toward the hidden forces that ex
everything," but rather a "process of tracing the interconnections,
ment and conflicts among actors and mediators as they come into
(171)—so resembles Geertz's account of ethnography as thick descr
"Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of 'construct
ing of'V' savs Geertz: which means "first to errasD and then to render" a
"multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed
upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and
inexplicit."4 Felski wittily suggests that to read this way means "to trudge
along like ANT," reveling in the surfaces, refusing the critical short-cuts,
patiently tracing the assemblages that come into being as "objects, ideas,
images, and texts from different moments swirl, tumble, and collide" (158).
Felski describes a critical practice that is sensuously and imaginatively
rich, unprofitable in the bottom-line sense, and time-intensive in ways that
draw us from potentially more productive tasks. Eve Sedgwick knew a large
part of why "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" was made Exhibit A
in the case against the liberal arts was resentment of the ways humanities
scholars, some fewer and fewer of us, still get to spend our time. We "may
work on the book till it's done; explain to the student till she understands,"
devoting chunks of paid time in each case to "questions whose urgency and
interest make a claim on our own minds, imaginations, and consciences."
Meanwhile millions "struggle to carve out barely, at great cost to themselves
the time, permission, and resources, 'after work' or instead of decently
paying work, for creativity and thought" not in the service of corporate
profit, and many, many more "are scarred by the prohibitive difficulty of
doing so."5 Which is to say we shouldn't expect the corporate university or
its stakeholders to reward or even register any turn to a new, post-critical

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 FORUM 171

spirit m literary studies and

do we have? I've just signe
undocumented college stud
tinuation of their degree pr
imprisonment, and deport
readings shall I assign in t
students? What of their ne
verseu m CTUique:
Felski invites us to add up "the costs of [our] ubiquitous criticality" (5).
I'd include the students we discouraged for desiring access to forms of excel
lence or beauty or wisdom that moved them. Students often find their way
into religious studies not because they are religious (although they might
well be) but because they are drawn to spiritual traditions they stumbled on
thanks to popularizers like Joseph Campbell or Huston Smith. The usual
effect of our "ubiquitous criticality" has been to turn these earnest seekers
away, or else to initiate them into our own hermeneutics of suspicion. Like
our colleagues in English, we're practiced at defending our area of study by
saying it promotes critical thinking. We teach students how not to be taken
xxi Kjy vvxxac txxuy x^a.va? xiuvv xxul lu xl^ciu x L.xxgxuusiy.

I'm ready to jettison "critical thinking" as the good we might offer in favor
of what Felski, citing the French critic Marielle Macé, calls a "stylistics of
existence" (176). The idea that reading can be equipment for living, a tool
for giving "our existence form, flavor, even style" (176), is not new. Foucault
was interested in the way that philosophy functioned for the ancients as
a kind of therapy for the soul, a discipline aimed not just at the gaining
of new knowledge but at a transformation of the knowing subject. What
would it mean to think with our students about reading to cultivate inner
lives of sensibility, resilience, and verve? We might begin by extending to
subjectivities Felski's generous insight about the singularity and sociability
of art. "There never was an isolated self-contained aesthetic object to begin
with," says Felski; "left to its own devices, this object would have long since
sunk into utter oblivion rather than coming to our attention. Art works can
only survive and thrive by making friends, creating allies, attracting disciples,
inciting attachments" (165). Even an unread book is full of other books;
taken down from the shelf and circulated, it comes to inhabit still other
books, other worlds. In a similar way, one's inner life is never solely one's
inner life, and never solely one's own. Geertz suggests that religious symbols
(including texts), in their flickering modalities of models-of and models-for,
"both express the world's climate and shape it. They shape it by inducing
in the worshiper a certain distinctive set of dispositions (tendencies, capaci

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 172 Religion (fc Literature

ties, propensities, skills, habits, liabilities, pronenesses) which lend a chronic

character to the flow of his experience and the quality of his experience."
Religious symbols are not unique among the texts and other non-human
actors that shape us. But there's a devotional quality in agreeing to b
worked on by a text, a level of attunement and a willingness to yield tha
might be like worship. A worry Felski gives voice to is this: "Once we star
talking about the power of art to make us think and feel differently, can the
-oo V.C1.11W11 l<xi uumiu;

(164). She urges us to approach what we rea

than in one of generosity and unabashed c
as Felski is fond of saying of history, is no
moat or a conceptual wall we set between
might be a name—curiosity, generosity, lov
being lured.
A post-critical practice might start with naming all critique has sealed
us from, and the need of it. What moves us? What gives? There will be no
shortage of uses for critique in the months and years to come. We might
seek readings that fit us to the task of pulling through.

Arizona State University

NOTES

1. For example, see my "Problem of the Postsecular," "Religion, Literature, and M

od," "The Secular' as Opposed to What?"
2. Sedgwick, "Queer and Now," 20.
3. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 94.
4. Ibid, 10.
5. Sedgwick, "Queer and Now," 19.
6. See "Letter to Presidents."
7. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 95.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fessenden, Tracy. "The Problem of the Postsecular." American Literary History 26, no. 1 (S
2014): 154-67.
. "Religion, Literature, and Method." Early American Literature 45, no.l (2010): 183-192.

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 FORUM 173

. "The 'Secular' as Opposed to W

631-37.
Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
"Letter to the Presidents of Arizona Community Colleges and Public Universities." Novem
ber 12, 2016. docs.google.com/document/d/lDip4sKL2nQrA-LIGkp9k6oPpSH6X
q4R5_d810Id8jA/edit.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Queer and Now." In Tendencies, 1-22. Durham, NC: Duke UP,
1993.

VULNERABILITIES AND REWARDS

Alan Jacobs

In The Limits of Critique Rita Felski offers "a close-up scrutiny of a i

style" (2) and of a "specific genre of writing" (187): the practice of r
suspiciously, and the rhetoric of suspicious reading. Her book is a w
admirable one, and if I am going to speak here of issues that Felski does
explore in depth, I do not mean to do so from within the genre of criti
(Were I working within that genre you would know, because I would
to anything that's not in the book as an "omission" and I would desc
omissions as "telling.") Early in the book Felski writes, "Critique wo
be so successful, after all, if it did not gratify and reward its practition
(9), and the questions I want to ask here are: What does critique gra
What are its rewards?

It does not seem obvious, on first reflection, that much gratification

emerges from critique. An air of grim dutifulness hovers about the prac
titioner. Moreover, masters and apprentices of critique alike may often be
heard to complain, sotto voce, that they wish they were allowed to do things
differently; some of them even lament that they don't remember how to
read books for pleasure any more. They don't seem especially gratified.
But certainly there are rewards in mastering the rhetoric of critique, at
least for some: jobs, publications, tenure, and the various accompanying
marks of professional success and belonging. Given those realities, it is easy
enough to say, in a Wittgensteinian spirit, that literary scholars practice cri
tique because critique is what literary scholars practice. But the conversation
need not end there. In The Limits of Critique Felski takes up the role of what
Terry Eagleton calls the "revolutionary questioner":

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