Interpreting the Uninterpretable: The Ethics of Opaqueness as an Approach to Moments of Inscrutability in Fieldwork

Xymena Kurowska*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

This paper develops what I call "the ethics of opaqueness"as a response to conceptual impasses concerning the uninterpretability of intersubjective knowledge production in narrative practice. The ethics of opaqueness sees the other as inscrutable and radically heterogenous, and confronts interpretations of the other by the self as suspicious projections. Thus, such an ethics addresses the self, not the other, as the object of the "hermeneutics of suspicion."In order to conceptualize the ethics of opaqueness, I look to relational psychoanalysis, which understands the unconscious as being inherently intersubjective. This results in a reformulation of the process of recognition, and deeper acknowledgment of countertransference-that is, the partly unconscious conflicts activated in the researcher through the research encounter, which may lead to imposing meaning on the other. The apparatus of relational psychoanalysis concretizes the limits of knowing either the other or the self and supplies a vocabulary to crystallize the double quality of "uninterpretable moments"in narrative practice. They may trigger an imposition of a frame and therefore an interpretive closure; however, they also supply a potentially transformative space for the contentious co-construction of meaning, often in the form of metaphors, which subverts any claim to interpretive mastery.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)431-446
Number of pages16
JournalInternational Political Sociology
Volume14
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Dec 2020

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