Abstract

One of Ricoeur’s legacies is the expression “school of suspicion”, indicating Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. However, this formula was not “invented” by Ricoeur, but by Nietzsche. This is an oddity. Indeed, Ricoeur never worked monographically on Nietzsche, although in his work the French philosopher disseminated precious insights on the German thinker. Hence the questions: is it possible to speak of a Ricoeurian interpretation of Nietzsche? What is its specificity? This essay will present both the published texts, and the Courses in which references to the German thinker appear. And it will show that what unifies this path is precisely the logic of suspicion, reconsidered through the phenomenological topos of “reduction”: reduction of the illusions of consciousness, tropological reduction, and genealogical reduction. This also tells us that, according to Ricoeur, suspicion is never only deconstructive criticism, but is always also archaeological deciphering and a proposal for liberation.