Argument

In calling psychoanalysis a “school of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970, 32), Ricoeur marks at once its use in a disposition characteristic of modernity: the disposition of suspicion. Modernity gives rise to various forms of suspicion, to modern forms of ressentiment and practices of disciplining oneself (the suspicion of oneself) as well as to an epistemology of suspicion. In this essay, I shall analyze the epistemological function of suspicion – which as the “paradigm of clues” (Ginzburg 1988) becomes the leading paradigm of the human sciences in the last third of the nineteenth century – and its close interrelationship with the techniques of power. As I shall demonstrate through a comparative reading of psychoanalytical, literary, and criminological texts, the modern production of knowledge in the human sciences cannot be separated from the modern “micro-physics of power,” which for Foucault was established in the eighteenth century, and the technologies of the self. I shall situate the paradigm of clues within the framework of the modern disposition of suspicion in order to combine the epistemological reflections with an analysis of cultural history. Thus I will first examine the paradigm of clues from the perspectives of cultural theory (Foucault and Nietzsche) and semiotics (Peirce), in order to illuminate the structural unreliability of the episteme as well as the way it is closely linked to the techniques of power. In what follows, I will apply this view to Bertillon's photographic identification system, the psychoanalytical concept of the trace, and Kafka's short story The Burrow.