The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-ethical by Peter Banki

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-ethical by Peter Banki Karl S. Sen Gupta (bio) The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-ethical By Peter Banki. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. 208 pp. Given its topic, Peter Banki's The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-ethical is a remarkably compact text, comprising 134 pages (not including 45 pages of notes). This fact alone marks Banki's text as exemplary. As it was, it took me more time than I'd expected to read it. This was not because of opaqueness or any such deficiency in the text, which is superbly written; rather, it took longer because of my need to continually pause to reflect on what I'd read. Not unlike the midrash, Banki's text makes one consider older issues anew, from fresh, even disconcerting perspectives. No doubt this is due in part to his reliance on Jacques Derrida, the gadfly par excellence, to say nothing of the topic itself, which will likely (one hopes) inspire intense debate for centuries to come. The relative brevity of Banki's text, then, is ideal, making an admirably efficient exercise of what might easily have degenerated into a slog. Banki's The Forgiveness to Come might be described, at the risk of oversimplification, as a reading of Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower through a Derridean lens. As related in the aptly named first chapter, "The Survival of the Question," Wiesenthal was deeply concerned lest the issue of forgiveness be silenced and the attendant discourse curtailed. In this light, Banki's choice of Derrida as a lens through which to read The Sunflower is brilliant. The resulting questions, here and elsewhere, are many—and barbed, so to speak—exactly in keeping with Wiesenthal's concerns. Banki provides a nuanced reading as he teases out a crucial aspect of Wiesenthal's wrestling with forgiveness—namely, his calling into question of his own position—leading Banki to label Wiesenthal's effort "'hyper-ethical' . . . because it affirms itself in giving unconditioned hospitality, or rather 'hostipitality,' to the other" (45). [End Page 216] In the second chapter, "Reading Forgiveness in a Marrano Idiom," Banki draws attention to Derrida's concerns that the globalization of Christianity has resulted in a cheapening of the violence and degradation accomplished in the Holocaust due to Christianity's insistence on the possibility—indeed, the necessity—that victims forgive. In this manner, forgiveness becomes a sort of business transaction (that is to say, limited and calculated, however sincere the initial motivation), which in turn greatly increases the possibility of future violence. Other considerations—such as the reduction of the Other to the Same—are also addressed. The following chapter, "Crimes against Humanity or the Phantasm of 'We, Men,'" is a logical outgrowth of the preceding chapter's talk of the "worldwidization" of Christianity. Christianity's emphasis on man as the imago dei, and therefore on universal brotherhood, has resulted in an abstraction (i.e., a reductionism) of the violence committed against individuals. Violence and degradation like that witnessed in the Holocaust is thereby thematized as a "crime against humanity." Surely, Banki observes, the Holocaust is more than an assault on the "'we' or 'we, men' of modern European philosophy" (82). In "A Hyper-ethics of Irreconcilable Contradictions," Banki draws on Derrida's metaphorical dialogue with Vladimir Jankélévitch, who counseled forgiveness after the Holocaust based on a universal human brotherhood. Noting the difficulties Jankélévitch experienced in attempting to live out this idea, Derrida concludes that we must seek out a new, radically "other" understanding of forgiveness. In this light, Banki counsels that we must look for a forgiveness understood "as truly impossible, as a radical experience of powerlessness" (99). In the final chapter, "Forgiveness as a Jewish Joke," Banki continues to problematize our simplistic understanding(s) of forgiveness by drawing attention to the contradictions and complexities inherent to the process, which must transcend the calculated, the totalizing, the formulaic. He does so, however, while eschewing pessimism or despair. Both like and unlike Derrida's "theology," our search for a new understanding of forgiveness, he stresses, is tantamount to awaiting...