Session 1: What is Forgiveness?

2nd Global Conference

Friday 13th March – Monday 16th March 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Forgiveness: A Quiet Assault on the Malicious
Steven Larocco
Southern Connecticut State University, USA

Forgiveness is the self’s quiet assault on the power of the malicious and the injurious. Its aim is to repair or mitigate the breaches and fractures the malicious and the injurious create within the self, between the self and other(s), and across the social order. It does this in two ways: publicly, as a ritualized speech-act, wherein forgiveness forges a special form of recognition, in which recognition of oneself as one who forgives stands in for and displaces various forms of non-recognition by the other(s); and privately, as a form of affective reattunement, in which a “decathexis” of the breach wrought by the malicious releases the self from an imposed shame and facilitates the reassertion of a self which has affirmatively assimilated injury, a process necessary for its release.

For forgiveness to be fully functional, it needs to operate both publicly and privately, both as a ritual speech-act and as a manifestation of affective reattunement. Publicly, it needs to operate as a ritual and not as a transaction, because forgiveness, unlike a transaction, can neither require nor demand reciprocity. As Paul Ricoeur might have said, forgiveness as public ritual is a form of imputation, a way of holding the other accountable, yet it still must be able to function under conditions of non-reciprocity. Forgiveness always operates in the ineluctable possibility of its repudiation by the other. It functions as a ritual affirmation that itself refuses to recognize the other’s power of negation; as ritualized speech-act, it imposes its own version of things on the other beyond the other’s power of negation, something a transaction, enmeshed in the logic of exchange, cannot achieve. Public rituals of forgiveness, in spite of this structural non-reciprocity, hold the other accountable even in the act of releasement of that accountability, a releasement that, ephemerally, negates the ongoing force that the malicious or injurious purports to have. It does this in two ways: first, by verbally taking on and naming what is not one’s own – the other’s malevolence, indifference or harm – and releasing the self socially from the stigmatizing traces of those capacities; and, second, by speaking into being a version of self and a form of social dignity that negates and survives the malicious.

Privately, forgiveness involves affective reattunement, which begins with a decathexis of the breach in self wrought by the malicious or the injurious. This entails an affective releasing of the psychic wound whose splitting force has generated a new, fractured identity-possibility for the self. While the breach may well be stigmatized psychically, in order for forgiveness to occur the self that has become simultaneously fractured and organized by an injurious breach must destigmatize that breach; that is, the self must withdraw investments in the identity possibilities constituted by psychic injury and the rectitude that transforms such injury into victimhood and identity formation. This involves the self’s assimilation and release of the shame wrought by injury and malice. And this assimilation is itself a negation of the power of the malicious, a form of non-recognition that negates.

Forgiveness, then, in its twofold structure – as public ritual and speech-act, and as affective reattunement – enables the self to generate an event and a condition of being that, at least ephemerally, negates much of the retroactive and ongoing force of the malicious and the injurious.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

That forgiveness is incompatible with forgetting is widely acknowledged in the literature. In order to forgive – rather than ‘pseudo-forgive, we might say – the forgiver must call a wrong to mind and have its seriousness in full view, rather than either suffer a bout of amnesia or mitigate/excuse the action.

But what counts as having the wrong in “full view”? Does anger cloud that view and make forgiveness impossible, as those who follow Butler in proposing that anger and resentment must be overcome in order for forgiveness to occur, seem to suggest?

I raise a puzzle here, concerning memory and reference. I argue that, in many cases, one does not actually remember a wrong, in the relevant sense, unless one feels appropriate and perhaps even strong emotions – sometimes anger and resentment – in recalling it. Does the soldier, for instance, actually have atrocities in “full view” if s/he feels nothing in the recall of them? Does the sexual abuse survivor have his/her abuse in “full view” if he or she can relay the events as though they happened to someone else? I will make the case that having wrongs in “full view,” and hence forgiveness, often requires feeling some version of the emotions experienced at the time of the wrongdoing. In short, the relevant event comprises these emotions, in as much as the (say) theft, violence, or falsehood, do.

On the other hand, remembering the wrong – having it in “full view” – must be distinct from reliving it, if forgiveness can occur. Shellshocked soldiers, or other sufferers of great traumas whose lives are interrupted by intrusive ‘flashbacks,’ are not remembering the events of the war or their trauma; as has been pointed out by many a philosopher, e.g., Riceour, the opposite of forgetting is not remembering but reliving. These persons do not have the events/wrongs in “full view.” It is not even clear they have them in view.

The challenge this puzzle raises is to articulate an account of having a wrong/event in “full view” that does not founder on either pole of the dilemma. One’s mental state must be, as it were, neither too cold nor too hot for genuine forgiveness to occur. Because remembering an emotion can, in some cases, seem to require experiencing some version of it, and because these emotions can make up the event that one must recall in order to forgive, the dilemma is a difficult one.

I wish, too, to bring in recent research suggesting that the same neurons fire in the recalling of an emotion as fire in the original experience of it.

This paper presents a process-based relational model of forgiveness, focusing on the nature and possibility of forgiveness by trauma survivors conceptualized as moral and normative repair. Repair in the wake of traumatic violence involves what we call “world-building,” which is crucial to the ability of survivors to move from despair to hope, from radical and disabling distrust to trust and engagement, and thus from impotence to effective agency. The process of navigating and negotiating forgiveness is a significant avenue to normative repair. We seek to understand what forgiveness requires, what it asks of survivors, and what it might offer them. Recognizing that standard views of what forgiveness offers perpetrators are often too thin, we will provide a more robust analysis of the costs and benefits of being forgiven. Our focus is on the forms of harms that would readily be deemed “unforgiveable.” Many but not all of our examples will come from survivor and perpetrator testimony from the Rwandan genocide.

Philosophers often treat forgiveness as an identifiable act that is an outcome of a deliberate choice on the part of the forgiver. Our model will by contrast be a dynamic one, which treats forgiveness as a slowly developing outcome of a series of changes, small and large, in a person’s relationship to the trauma and its aftermath. Both the Tutsi rescapé living outside Rwanda and the one who stayed behind, living alongside former génocidaires, must struggle with the aftermath of their experience, including defining a relation to the perpetrator(s). On this view, forgiveness is an emergent phenomenon; it cannot be demanded or ordered.

A process-based relational model of forgiveness provides necessary tools for understanding normative repair in post-genocidal societies, like Rwanda. While acknowledging that unilateral forgiveness, undertaken by the forgiver either for her own sake or for the sake of the offender, may be possible, we find that analysis of unilateral cases ultimately returns us to an underlying relational model. We argue that forgiveness emerges from other phenomena, such as cohabitation within a community, small gestures of reconciliation, working on shared projects, the rebuilding of real trust.

Arguing that forgiveness is best construed as a process, which may or may not include specific watershed moments, we examine the nature of the process, articulate the elements which must be in place for engagement in the process (safety being primary), and the types of demands placed upon and possible outcomes for both the forgiver and the forgiven. This requires us to explain the moral thickness of forgiveness, distinguishing it from denial, while exposing ways the conditions from which forgiveness emerges place the survivor in a stronger position by setting norms that promote her safety and well being. Forgiveness, on this view, entails taking and exercising normative power, establishing one’s authority in relation to oneself, one’s assailant, and the character of one’s community. This richer notion of forgiveness is not achieved with the simple speech act “I forgive you” but only through a complex set of actions and conditions, the completion of which may make the utterance of such a speech act anti-climactic at best.