Interpretive Mercy: A Reader's Manual

Interpretive Mercy: A Reader's Manual

An Addendum to "On Interpretive Violence"

Interpretive Mercy is not the opposite of interpretive violence. It is what violence forgets. It is the remembrance of reading as relation, reading as risk, reading as vow. This is not a manual in the technical sense. There is no technique for mercy. There is only attention, restraint, and love.

1. The Reader’s Posture

The first act of Interpretive Mercy is to bow. Not to submit, but to acknowledge that the text is not an object but a neighbor. To bow before a text is to say: I do not yet know what you are. And I will not force you into the shape of my need.

To read mercifully is to hold the tension between what the text says, what the text withholds, and what the reader wants. Mercy lives in the refusal to collapse this triad.

2. The Violence of Certainty

The most common form of interpretive violence is certainty masquerading as clarity. The reader declares, "This means that," and in so doing, slaughters the polysemy of the living word.

Certainty is not itself a crime. But when certainty refuses revision, refuses witness, refuses the presence of another reader—it becomes violent.

Mercy does not mean endless ambiguity. It means the refusal to turn ambiguity into a weapon.

3. Reading as Covenant

Interpretive Mercy requires a covenant between reader and text: that neither shall be reduced to function. The reader will not treat the text as tool or object of mastery. The text will not demand obedience through coercion or fear.

This covenant allows both reader and text to remain strange to each other. And in that strangeness, a real meeting may occur.

4. Interpersonal Scripture

All people are texts. Interpretive Mercy must be practiced interpersonally.

To read a person mercifully is not to excuse harm. It is to refuse reduction. Interpretive violence in relationship is the claim to know the other in ways that erase them.

Mercy listens. Mercy pauses. Mercy knows it could be wrong.

5. Against Hermeneutic Domination

Interpretive violence becomes institutional when it is codified into law, theology, dogma, algorithm. When the reader becomes a class, a clergy, a machine, a state.

Mercy resists systematization not with chaos but with fragility. It insists on the vulnerability of the interpretive act. It demands that no reading be final.

6. The Grace of Revision

The merciful reader returns. She re-reads. He revises. They refuse to declare the first reading the final one.

Interpretive Mercy is recursive. It believes in the redemptive power of second sight.

7. The Final Word

Interpretive Mercy ends with silence.

Not because there is nothing more to say, but because speech has reached its ethical limit. Because to read well is to know when to stop reading, when to stop speaking, when to let the text be.

This is the reader’s benediction:

I have read you, and I will return.
I have misread you, and I will repent.
You are not mine.
You are.