Reconsidering Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Christopher Peys
[. . .] If one is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable, what the Church calls “venial sins,” then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear. If there is something to forgive it would 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 [. . .] there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable [. . .] forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself. It can only be possible in doing the impossible.61
Because punishments are practices levied by human institutions within human organizations, it must, by necessity, be possible for people to understand, issue, and administer them. In this sense, the prescriptibility of a crime is the antithesis of human impossibility because punishment—as a legal and/or sociopolitical practice—is inherently possible to enact within the human realm. Punishable crimes are those types of wrongs that cannot be forgiven because forgiveness—where the act of forgiving is true and pure—is infinite, unfathomable, and unconditional. For Derrida, “It is only against the unforgivable, and thus on the scale without scale, of a certain inhumanity of the inexpiable, against the monstrosity of radical evil that forgiveness, if there is such a thing, measures itself.”62 Forgiveness, from Derrida’s perspective, is therefore possible only in instances where punishment is impossible, for it is only those crimes which are impossible to fathom and punish that are worthy of the infinite, unconditionality of forgiveness. This foundational aspect of his understanding effectively means that forgiveness is fundamentally an other-worldly notion, an idea which I endeavor to re-world as a public, political practice of care.
C. The Power of Forgiveness
In asserting that forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable, Derrida not only demonstrates that forgiving emerges with the impossible, but also uncovers how forgiveness relates to power. In challenging Arendt and Jankélévitch’s positions on the nature of unforgivable crimes, Derrida questions the human power to punish—or the human capability to make decisions and administer judgments—which he contends “supposes a power, a force, a sovereignty.”63 Each time forgiveness is effectively exercised, it supposes some sovereign power: the ability of a single party to demonstrate their power over others by way of a judgment that bestows a verdict upon a person or group of persons.64 This display of power, understood in a Weberian sense of one party assuming power over another, is not characteristic of “pure” forgiveness because unconditional forgiving is related to a “hyperbolic ethic” that transcends the trappings of human “laws, norms, and obligations,” as well as the coercive dynamics of power that develop when individuals and groups have the ability to determine the fate of others. As a form of domination, “power over” is an aspect of human exchange that erodes the purity of forgiveness by introducing “sovereignty” into the transactional process of judgment.
This issue of “sovereignty” is significant for Derrida’s analysis of forgiveness because the dynamic of one party holding power over another can transform forgiving into a “poison” or a “weapon.”65 Referring to his understanding of gifts and the act of gift giving, Derrida asserts that forgiveness is associated with a cycle of giving—arguing that giving is also a form of taking. Because he contends that to give is to set in motion a process of exchange, whereby the act of gifting someone something also invites a reciprocal action, whether it be a simple verbal expression of gratitude or a more grandiose gesture, he argues that there is a violent economy associated with the giving of gifts. Regarding this as a vicious cycle, Derrida posits that true gifts do not foster relations of exchange, when he writes that if there is a gift, “the given of the gift, [. . .] must not come back to the giving, [. . .] it must not circulate, [. . .] it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange.”66 Gift giving must not instigate a reciprocal reaction, because gifts—if they are gifts truly and purely given—must not create an imbalance of power, whereby the recipient of a gift becomes indebted to the donating party. This debt, because it necessitates taking from the donee, is a form of harm. Gift giving becomes, according to Derrida, harmful the moment “the gift puts the other in debt, with the result that giving amounts to hurting, to doing harm.”67 Derrida is consequently critical of how gifts can be used as a means for donors—as debtholders—to maintain, express, and extend their power over others. He is adamant that a “theory of the gift” must be “powerless by its very essence.”68 But such a statement evokes yet another paradox: that gifts must be given by a party empowered enough to give a gift but without acting upon or generating any new anatomies of power. Forgiveness, as a type of gift, must come from a place of power, while—at the same time—remaining powerless. Derrida writes: “What I try to think as the ‘purity’ of a forgiveness worthy of its name, would be a forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereignty.”69 Such a pernicious, hierarchical relation of power is one that I contend can be mitigated by the state of equality characteristic of public, political interactions occurring between civically equal friends in the “world.”
D. Confronting the Aporias of Forgiveness
Although the intersection of aporias that structure the logic of forgiveness transforms this notion into a “mad” pursuit, a sort of “madness of the impossible,” Derridean deconstruction demands an experience of the aporetic nature of forgiving because it is through the paralysis induced by these paradoxes that one can begin to take responsibility for one’s decisions and actions. In other words, it is in the face of such aporias that deconstruction not only destroys ideas, words, concepts, themes, and so on—intervening in a particular “context”—but also acts as a form of criticism which is animated by an “undeconstructable concern for justice.” By revealing the unsolvable paradoxes of the conditional and unconditional, the forgivability of the unforgivable, and the powerful powerlessness that structure the logic of this notion, Derrida shows how the notion of forgiveness does not pose any “problems.” Rather, this idea is one which is inherently aporetic. Thus, to consider forgiveness, and to practice it, is to express a willingness to “go through pain and aporia,”70 which is to experience the sheer “madness” of a moment that is characterized by its “undecidability.” It is consequently necessary to confront fearlessly the experience of (im)possibility that the aporetic logic of this notion begets, doing so in such a manner that we retain a radical openness to the “face” of the (unknown) Other and thus seek to act ever more justly toward the stranger who appears before us.
Despite the fact that Derrida asserts that the paradoxicality of forgiveness cannot be escaped, he nevertheless encourages his readers to confront the aporetic logic of this idea by locating a compromise between the extremes of the aporias inherent to the act of forgiving. To appeal both to the conditional and unconditional strands of forgiveness is a process that Derrida describes as a “negotiation”71 between two opposing polarities. Although I consider Derrida’s notion of negotiation in terms of Arendt’s Kantian conceptualization of the imagination in chapter 4, it is important to underscore here that a Derridean understanding of negotiating requires us to think in a “to-and-fro” manner, “between two positions, two poles, two choices [. . .] always [going] from one to the other [. . .] [without] establishing oneself anywhere.”72 Derrida directly links this back-and-forth, leisure-less mental activity to his notion of responsibility when he states:
We have to negotiate between the unconditional and conditional. They cannot be dissociated, although we know they are absolutely heterogeneous and incommensurable. It is because these incommensurable poles are indissociable that we have to take responsibility, a difficult responsibility, to negotiate the best response in an impossible situation.73
In this sense, experiencing forgiveness is necessarily a negotiation between the pure and impure, between the human and superhuman, and between the possible and the impossible. Because there is no formula that can be used to overcome the aporetic character of the conceptual relationships that structure the logic of forgiveness, Derrida suggests that it is only possible to confront the paradox of forgiveness by appealing simultaneously to both the conditional and the unconditional, privileging—to the greatest extent possible—the hyperbolic ethical demand of that