The hermeneutics of suspicion is a style of literary interpretation in which texts are read with skepticism in order to expose their purported repressed or hidden meanings.
[1] This mode of interpretation was conceptualized by Paul Ricœur, inspired by the works of what he called the three "masters of suspicion" (French: maîtres du soupçon):[2] Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche,[3]: 33, 35 who, he believed, shared a similar view of consciousness as false.
"[10][11] According to literary theorist Rita Felski, hermeneutics of suspicion is "a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths."
Felski further writes: [Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche] share a commitment to unmasking 'the lies and illusions of consciousness'; they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths… Ricoeur's term has sustained an energetic after-life within religious studies, as well as in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields.
[12]Felski also notes that the "'hermeneutics of suspicion' is the name usually bestowed on [a] technique of reading texts against the grain and between the lines, of cataloging their omissions and laying bare their contradictions, of rubbing in what they fail to know and cannot represent.