On Forgiveness

I
“In principle, there is no limit to forgiveness, no measure, no moderation, no ‘to what point?’. Provided, of course, that we argee on some ‘proper’ meaning of this word.(…)

Forgiveness is often confounded, sometimes in a calculated fashion, with related themes: excuse, regret, amnesty, prescription, etc.(…)

I shall risk this proposition: each time forgiveness is at the service of a finality, be it noble and spiritual (atonement or redemption, reconciliation, salvation), each time that it aims to re-establish a normality (social, national, political, psychological) by a work of mourning, by some therapy or ecology of memory, then the ‘forgiveness’ is not pure- nor is its concept. Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalising. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality.(…)

II
In order to approach now the very concept of forgiveness, logic and common sense agree for once in the paradox: it is necessary, it seems to me, to begin from the fact that, yes, there is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness? If one is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable, what the church calls ‘venial sin’, then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear. If there is something to forgive, it should be what in religious language is called mortal sin, the worst, the unforgivable crime or harm. From which comes the aporia, which can be described in its dry and implacable formality, without mercy: forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable. One cannot, or should not, forgive; there is only forgiveness, if there is any, when there is the unforgivable. That is to say that forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself. it can only be possible in doing the impossible. (…)

For the common or dominant axiom of the tradition, finally, and to my eyes the most problematic, is that forgiveness must have a meaning. And this meaning must determine itself on the ground of salvation, or reconciliation, redemption, atonement, I would say even sacrifice.(…)

III
Because if I say, as I think, the forgiveness is mad, and that it must remain a madness of the impossible, this is certainly not to exclude or disqualify it. It is even, perhaps, the only thing that arrives, that surprises, like a revolution, the ordinary course of history, politics and law. Because that means that it remains heterogeneous to the order of politics or of the judicial system as they are ordinarily understood.(…)

IV
Once again, however, I believe it necessary to distinguish between forgiveness and reconciliation, this reconstitution of a health or a ‘normality’, as necessary and desirable as it would it appear through amnesties, the ‘work of mourning’ etc. A ‘finalised’ forgiveness is not forgiveness; it is only a political strategy or a psycho-therapeutic economy.(…)

I remain ‘torn’ (between a ‘hyperbolic’ ethical vision of forgiveness, pure forgiveness, and the reality of a society at work in pragmatic processes of reconciliation). But without power, desire, or need to decide.(…)

VII
What I dream of, what I try to think as the ‘purity’ of a forgiveness worthy of its name, would be a forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereighty. The most difficult talk, at once necessary and apparently impossible, would be to dissociate unconditionality and sovereignty. Will that be done one day? It is not around the corner, as is said. But since the hypothesis of this unpresentable task announces itself, be it as a dream for thought, this madness is perhaps not so mad…”

On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness by Jacques Derrida (2001)

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