Resistances to Theory Brian O'Keeffe (bio) I'm wary of generalizing about theory. One who isn't is Toril Moi. In Revolution of the Ordinary, she characterizes "the atmosphere of skepticism and suspicion that pervades so much of contemporary theory" (2017, 90). What also characterizes contemporary theory, for her, is the assumption that there's meaning hidden beneath a text's surface, and that it's the critic's task to excavate that meaning, as if to reveal what the text didn't realize was concealed in its putative depths. But "nothing is hidden" (175), and because this is so, we can shift "beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion" (175). Some will be nonplussed by this. Others, hackles raised, will ask whether "hermeneutics" can be a one-size-fits-all designation for all interpretative approaches designated as "theoretical." Moreover, the depth/surface opposition is active in some cases—psychoanalytic readings presume the text's "surface" can be read for symptoms of an underlying unconscious logic. Certain Marxian readings suppose a similar 'depth' to be uncovered—Jameson's The Political Unconscious perhaps. But it's not clear whether approaches that actually do label themselves as hermeneutical (Gadamer's, Ricoeur's, Vattimo's, and others) assume that depth/surface opposition at all, nor whether they are hermeneutically suspicious—one might justifiably call them hermeneutic positions informed by trust. Other objections concern the conflation of suspicion and skepticism. Is skepticism compatible with the hermeneutics of suspicion? It was Ricoeur, of course, who listed the "masters of suspicion"—Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. But, as Zahi Zalloua observes, it's worth reminding ourselves of what he wrote: "All three clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth" (2018, 9). The stakes are higher than those normally wagered by literary critics—at issue is philosophical truth, and the salutary effects of a philosophical suspicion that works to clear out idées reçues and conceptual shibboleths. But what Ricoeur regards as salutary about such suspicion depends on ensuring that suspicion doesn't become merely pernicious, destructive of any or all values or truths. Whence the troubling question: can hermeneutics contain suspicion, immunize itself from suspicion run amok, channel suspicion into the conduits where a better truth can be the reliable, and desired outcome? If it cannot, hermeneutics risks becoming so radical in its attitudes of suspicion that it cannot be regarded as hermeneutics at [End Page 251] all. Nietzsche: it's highly debatable as to whether the explosive power of the Nietzschean account can be contained by hermeneutics (or, since it's the same point, whether Nietzsche can be called a hermeneutic thinker). Moreover, as Zalloua argues, if hermeneutics can just about contain suspicion, it might not be able to contain skepticism, which is possibly a more potently unruly force than even suspicion, in fact. Perhaps these considerations are only philosophical, and thus literary studies can work with a looser notion of hermeneutics, and work, moreover, with a notion of suspicion (and/as/or skepticism) that's simply meant to characterize a sort of leery distrust of the literary text. I'm not sure one should be as loose as that, however, although whether one needs "theory" (or a more rigorous specification of "hermeneutics") to tighten things up for us is perhaps the crux of the matter. For Moi, though, the point is that our interpretive démarche ought to be motivated by trust, tact, friendliness, and care, rather than suspicion and skepticism. Even if the goal is determined as a politically vital act of critique, "sometimes skepticism and suspicion will simply be less politically useful than admiration, care, love" (2017, 176). When sometimes skepticism and suspicion might be more useful, Moi only scantly describes. But let's take the point: perhaps too much dispassion has crept into literary studies, to the detriment of more emotional investments. And if it was theory that disbarred scholars and readers of literature from registering their feelings about literature, or else restricted the gamut of feeling to suspicion alone, then theory is to be blamed for having invented a reader who is emotionally cramped, stunted by the over-technical demands of a discipline that has...