Session 5: Jankélévitch and Derrida

2nd Global Conference

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

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Do unforgivable deeds exist, or there are only people who cannot forgive? How can we decide whether a deed is forgivable or not? What is the connection between the notion of unforgivable and collective crimes? Among the philosophers, whose works played most important role for philosophy of forgiveness after the World War II, two made special efforts to answer these questions: Vladimir Jankélévitch and Jacques Derrida. Both of them tried to build a conception of forgiveness, which would help dealing with difficult XX century past. Both failed, but for different reasons. In this paper I examine their theories, point at their weaknesses and try to build my own supplement to their works.

Jankélévitch is the author of Le Pardon, a book devoted to the notion of forgiveness. It is one of the most subtle approaches toward this subject. Forgiveness has no boundaries – Jankélévitch writes – however we can only forgive when the guilty person repents, pleads guilty and asks for pardon. A few years after publishing Le Pardon, however, Jankélévitch claimed that “forgiveness died in death camps” and stressed that the Germans never asked for forgiveness. This statement was followed by a letter to Jankélévitch from a young German, Wiard Raveling, who asked for reconciliation. Alas, Jankélévitch contended that reconciling would mean starting a new epoch, which “was too long awaited” and that he is too old even to try.

This story is a point of departure for Jacques Derrida’s analyze of forgiveness. He accuses Jankélévitch of inconsequence: though he defined the conditions of forgiveness in Le Pardon, in the most important moment he refrained from making a step forward.

“There are no boundaries for forgiveness, no ‘to what extent?’” – writes Derrida – “forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable.” It would be no virtue to forgive something we can easily excuse. Forgiveness of unforgivable is madness, is a secret, but – by all means – is possible and needed. Jankélévitch should have forgiven. Nevertheless, also Derrida eventually fails to answer the question about forgiveness in context of collective crimes. He recalls this question all the time, though he never explains, if the mad forgiveness could or should forgive the death camps.

At the last section of the paper I shall look for a supplement to both analyzes. In my opinion, unforgivable deeds exist. No one is able to forgive any collective crime, because he cannot represent all the victims. In this meaning, collective crimes are always unforgivable. But does this mean we have no chance of starting all over again? The experience of the XX century brings us from collectiveness to an individual. Although it is possible that anyone could forgive the Shoah, a meeting and forgiveness between two specific individuals is imaginable. In my opinion, this is the only sensible way of further consideration, if we draw the right conclusions from Jankélévitch’s and Derrida’s failures.

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Manchester University, UK

The question of forgiveness, a meaningful or meaningless one, the way of forgiving someone and to whom it can be granted is a very complicated practice. Undoubtedly, there are conditions for an act, crime or sin to be forgiven. This issue is more enhanced when Jacques Derrida sheds his deconstructive idea over it especially that in his case one faces aporia.

A true definition of forgiveness, proposed by Jacques Derrida is the one which is without limitation and measure. “In principle, there is no limit to forgiveness, no measure, no moderation, no ‘to what point?’…” Despite its limitations, forgiveness can be confined to themes like “excuse, regret, amnesty, prescription, etc.” But, apart from the possibility or impossibility of it, a true forgiveness, to Derrida, is that which is to be granted to an unforgivable sin. Even it goes beyond crimes against humanity since such crimes are often forgivable by the governments and politician’s amnesty. “It should not be normal, normative, normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of impossible.” Such kind of forgiveness of which Derrida speaks, very haplessly encounters us with aporia since, firstly, there must be something unforgivable, and secondly, that unforgivable sin must be a moral one not a venial one. One instance that Derrida proposes to be granted forgiveness is Shoah, the Holocaust and this suggestion is contrary to what Jankélévitch proposes for punishment for a sin and forgiveness and unforgivable. (He mentions that punishment for the sin must be in proportion with the sin. If it is not proportionate, that sin is unforgivable.) This is what is calls “inexpiable” or irreparable. But to Derrida, thus, forgiveness is impossible because of its relation to the unforgivability. He questions of what and whom should be forgiven. Also, the victim who is absent, dead and disappeared must forgive, but it is impossible, thus the role of third party in the act of forgiveness becomes soundless. There should be no reconciliation behind forgiveness and also to Derrida the unconditional forgiveness must not refer to a certain idea or meaning. Based on this, such forgiveness shackles ordinary course of history, politics, and law and because of its non-referentiality to a particular meaning or party, it remains heterogeneous to the order of politics and international relationships. This is the paradox or aporia in Derridean deconstructive forgiveness.

In a general sense, what Derrida dreams of as the “purity of forgiveness”, and ends up in aporia, is the one which is “without power: unconditional but without sovereignty. The most difficult task, at once necessary and apparently impossible, would be to dissociate unconditionality and sovereignty.”

What the researcher tries to do in this essay is to bring together Derrida’s idea on forgiveness and study the aporia in it and indicate that how such idea of aporia in unconditional forgiving the unforgivable is related to the aporia in themes of responsibility and secret that Derrida discusses in The Gift of Death. In both cases one is encountered with impossibility. The singularity of having and knowing a secret that brings responsibility and makes one nonconformist to the social ethics and at the same time kept in relation with such regulations. In fact, the root of the theme of forgiveness stems from the notion of secret. One might wonder how secret and forgiveness are linked. The answer to this question is in the idea aporia and impossible. The secret that Derrida calls “mysretium tremendum” reminds him of “the economy of sublation… [or] logic of repression that still retains what is denied” the impossibility of this secret lies in the fact that any attempt to decipher it is a conversion to another secret. This is what Derrida calls the work of mourning in The Gift of Death. And this is what he discusses as the impossibility to avoid speaking in his essay “How to Avoid Speaking, Denial”. Keeping this secret inside to the moment of death, in every moment and every new conversion of secret brings new structure of responsibility. Thus, the main question of the structure of this essay would be how the theme of impossibility and aporia can be traced in forgiveness and secret and what the role of responsibility would be.

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