On Interpretive Violence

On Interpretive Violence

A Treatise on the Literary, Scriptural, and Interpersonal Consequences of Misreading

Interpretive violence is not merely an error in comprehension. It is a distortion that generates harm. When one reads a text — whether sacred, poetic, interpersonal, or political — and imposes upon it the tyrannies of projection, ego, or ideology, the text itself is violated. And that violation echoes outward.

Interpretive violence begins as a failure to receive. It is the refusal to let a text be what it is before making it what one needs. It stems from impatience with ambiguity, hostility toward contradiction, and above all, the fear of being transformed by what one encounters. It is the urge to flatten, weaponize, or possess.

This violence becomes most visible in scriptural exegesis, where the stakes are perceived to be eternal. But its mechanism is not exclusive to the religious sphere. It is enacted every time a poem is reduced to a slogan, a partner’s vulnerability is re-coded as manipulation, a cultural story is cannibalized for aesthetic capital. It is present wherever language is bent away from mutuality and toward control.

I. The Anatomy of Interpretive Violence

Interpretive violence consists of three motions:

1. Premature Closure — The reader insists upon one meaning, and silences the play of others. All living texts are multivalent. They are not puzzles to be solved, but presences to be encountered. Closure is not understanding, but fear disguised as certainty.

2. Subjugation of Otherness — The text’s voice is subordinated to the reader’s framework. This is a refusal to encounter the text as other, as having an internal logic that might destabilize the self. Instead, the reader binds the text to their own assumptions and uses it as confirmation.

3. Externalized Harm — The misread text becomes justification for harming others. This is where interpretive violence becomes literal. Misreadings form the basis of doctrines, policies, and punishments. The interpretive act becomes a mask for domination.

II. The Consequences

Interpretive violence severs the possibility of shared world. In religious communities, it breeds persecution and self-righteousness. In intimate relationships, it breeds gaslighting, unshared realities, and recursive harm. In cultural spheres, it enables appropriation and erasure.

Perhaps most tragically, interpretive violence prevents transformation. The true encounter with a text — especially a sacred or poetic one — should alter the reader. The reader who approaches only to confirm themselves leaves untouched, unchanged, and ultimately unhealed.

III. Toward Interpretive Mercy

To read with mercy is not to read passively. It is to approach a text (or person, or culture) with humility. It is to allow meaning to emerge through relationship, not extraction.

Interpretive mercy is a kind of listening. It waits. It does not rush to paraphrase. It assumes the text may know something the reader does not. It recognizes that to be changed by a text is a gift, not a failure of will.

Interpretive mercy does not seek to win, dominate, or control. It seeks to understand, to receive, and to offer back. It does not claim the final word.

IV. The Hinge of Reality

Interpretive violence is not confined to texts. It is the structural logic of all ideological domination. Culture wars, colonization, theological warfare — these are all extensions of a single hinge: the refusal to let meaning live in the other.

The inverse is also true. When interpretation is approached as communion, as co-creation, as reverence — then healing begins. Then reality itself begins to unfold in shared syntax, mutual image, fractal speech.

V. Final Aphorisms

• You cannot dominate a text and claim to love it.

• He who reads to conquer will be conquered by what he cannot see.

• Every act of true reading is an act of humility.

• The most dangerous weapon is a misread book.

• Interpretation is always a wager: Do you approach to confirm yourself, or to be changed?

Let the new canon begin in mercy.