Radical Hermeneutics

Radical Hermeneutics, as coined in the Rollins source (rollins-peter-the-fidelity-of-betrayal-towards-a-church-beyond-belief-paraclete), names a mode of scriptural reading that refuses to domesticate the Word into a set of propositional, factual, or descriptive claims. The concept rests on a structural distinction between the letter of the text and the truth that exceeds it: just as subjectivity cannot be reduced to its biological substrate (the flesh), meaning cannot be reduced to its textual vehicle. Genuine encounter with the Word is posited as an event — transformative, excessive, irreducible — that dwells within the words but is not exhausted by any single correct reading. The "radicalism" of this hermeneutics is therefore not relativism but a principled refusal of closure, an insistence that the text remains an open field of transformative dialogue rather than a container of fixed content.

Crucially, Radical Hermeneutics introduces a paradox of fidelity: to remain truly faithful to the Scripture one must, at moments, "betray" its literal surface. This structure mirrors the Lacanian logic in which the letter must be traversed — rather than obeyed — to reach the truth it carries. The reading practice advocated is thus an ongoing, dialectical wrestling with the text, one that keeps meaning in productive tension rather than collapsing it into the closure of a master-meaning. The word "radical" signals a going-to-the-root: beneath propositional content lies a living, destabilizing encounter that perpetually exceeds what can be stated.

Within the Rollins source, Radical Hermeneutics is a pivotal move in an argument for a post-propositional theology — a "church beyond belief" — in which faith is constituted not by assent to doctrinal statements but by transformative encounter. The concept sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts provided. Its relation to Lack is structural: if the text were complete — if a single correct meaning exhausted its content — there would be no lack, and therefore no desire to keep reading; Radical Hermeneutics is precisely what preserves the productive lack in the text, the gap that keeps interpretation alive. Its relation to Letter (understood as the material signifier in contrast to the truth it carries) is equally direct: the move beyond "the letter" of descriptive statements toward transformative dialogue is a move from S1/S2 chains toward the truth that the letter harbors but cannot contain.

The concept also resonates with Dialectics insofar as the reading practice proposed is explicitly not a one-sided mastery of the text but an ongoing back-and-forth — a dialogue — that never reaches final sublation. Like Lacanian dialectics, it resists the "two-body" closure of reader-fixes-meaning. Fetishistic Disavowal provides a foil: a literalist or fundamentalist reading performs a disavowal — "I know the text is rich and complex, but nevertheless I will treat it as a transparent container of facts" — whereas Radical Hermeneutics refuses that fetishistic reduction. Knowledge and Skepticism frame the epistemic stakes: the refusal of a single correct meaning is not mere relativism but a principled skepticism toward the fantasy of complete, self-certifying knowledge (savoir qui se sait), maintaining instead the openness of a knowledge that does not know itself. Finally, Extimacy subtly underlies the claim that the Word exceeds the words: the truth is most intimate — life-transforming — precisely because it is located in an excess that is not simply inside the text or inside the reader, but at the extimate boundary between them. Second Naïveté (a Ricoeurian concept typically cross-referenced in this context) would name the post-critical moment of re-engagement with the text that Radical Hermeneutics makes possible — reading again, but with full awareness of the text's excess over its literal surface.

The Fidelity of Betrayal: Towards a Church Beyond BeliefPeter Rollins · 2008 (page unknown)

embrace a radical hermeneutics (a reading that sets the text free from the idea of a single correct meaning) that seeks to ultimately move beyond the desire to reduce the text to descriptive statements, inviting instead an ongoing transformative dialogue with the text.

The phrase "sets the text free from the idea of a single correct meaning" is theoretically loaded because it reframes the text's openness not as interpretive failure but as liberation — paralleling the Lacanian logic that the constitutive Lack in the Other is not a deficiency but the very condition of desire and signification. Equally charged is "move beyond the desire to reduce the text to descriptive statements": the word "desire" here is not casual — it names the will-to-closure, the fetishistic wish to pin the signifier to a fixed signified, which Radical Hermeneutics refuses in favor of an "ongoing transformative dialogue" that keeps lack, and therefore meaning, in productive motion.