The Limits of Suspicion and the Possibilities of Love

Alongside Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx, Kierkegaard is a true master of the hermeneutics of suspicion. However, more than any other master of suspicion, Kierkegaard is keenly aware of suspicion’s potential existential and even epistemic dangers. In Works of Love , Kierkegaard warns that if suspicion becomes an exclusive mode of critique, rather than effectively exposing dogmatism, it can harden into a kind of hermeneutical dogmatism of its own. By contrast, he argues that love sees deeper than suspicion and is less susceptible to deception. This claim seems naive at best and dangerous at worst – something that the masters of suspicion would identify as illusion and internalized oppression. In this chapter, however, I offer extended analyses of Kierkegaard’s “suspicion of suspicion” and two of his most controversial prescriptions: (1) presupposing love and (2) finding mitigating explanations. I argue that, far from dismantling suspicion, these practices are designed to rehabilitate readers from hermeneutical dogmatism and thereby preserve suspicion’s justice-seeking capacities.