The Limits of Forgiveness and the Ends of Politics

Abstract

In a powerfully engaging and wide-ranging lecture ‘On Forgiveness’, Jacques Derrida suggests that forgiveness plays an essential, yet necessarily paradoxical, role in the fraught politics of reconciliation and in the legal, political and moral responses to crimes against humanity. He argues with awareness of the paradoxicality of his argument, and seemingly without irony, that forgiveness exists only for (because of and in response to) those acts that are unforgivable. By contrast, Hannah Arendt has argued that we are simply incapable of forgiving the most serious of crimes against persons qua persons, crimes against humanity, quintessentially the crimes of genocide. For her such crimes are strictly unforgivable and in that status they throw light on boundaries intrinsic to human action, and hence to political and moral life. Not only do such crimes not call forth forgiveness but, for Arendt, they point to a space (or a chaos) that seems to lie outside of human action or response, defying judgment and thought itself. In this paper, I discuss the idea of forgiveness in light of these very different approaches. The principal objective of the paper is to clarify whether and how the moral notion of forgiveness stands in relation to the political meanings of action and violence.