CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 421
When the Flesh Becomes Word, or, The Semiotic Model of Human
Embodiment
Withthisgeneralremark,Iwanttoleavethedebateaboutcancerand
"its" representations and conclude with a few words addressing in a
more circumscribed way the relation between the disease and cultural
critique. This will also bring us back to the question of semantics and
somatics. Canceris not only anoften deadly disease,itis also adisease
of signs, signs which, as was argued above, often are ambiguous or
come altogether too late. In addition, cancer can go into remission; its
signs and symptoms may disappear for a while but the disease might
return, even in more acute fashion and without being duly "announced"
by signs and symptoms. This is why the cancer experience is often the
occasion for exercising a particular form of reading the body in
biomedicalinterpretation,whichcanverywellbedescribedbytheterm
"hermeneutics of suspicion": patients and doctors not trusting the
surface facts attempt to decode the body for the hidden or disguised
presence of cancer. And since they can never be sure that their
hermeneutic work is correct or complete, this subjects them to a
perpetualstateofuncertaintyifnotoutrightemergency.
Theconceptofa"hermeneuticsofsuspicion"originatedmanyyears
ago in a context which might be described as an interdisciplinary
crossroads of philosophy, psychology, and cultural critique. In Paul
Ricoeur's Freud and Psychology (1970), such a hermeneutics is
originally part of a pair of contrary processes of meaning-making. The
oppositepartofsuchahermeneuticsofdistrustandunbelieving^117 isthe
hermeneuticsoffaith,amoretraditionalapproachderivedfromBiblical
hermeneutics. While this latter operation seeks to listen to and re-store
meanings located in a given text (Freud and Philosophy27, 35), its
counterpart works on the assumption that texts and their meanings are
not transparent but disguise their intended sense. "Over against
interpretation as restoration of meaning we shall oppose interpretation
according to what I collectively call the school of suspicion," a school
(^117) Gadamer questions the clear-cut distinction Ricoeur is drawing here: "Is not
everyform of hermeneutics a form of overcoming an awareness of suspicion?"
("HermeneuticsofSuspicion"313).