Throwing in something rather academicky here–it is just a little experiment! I liked this paper a lot, mostly because it helped me to unpack something quite profound in Derrida’s thought. I want to share what I have learned.
In “On Forgiveness,” Derrida tries to discover the “pure” act, what forgiveness is at its core, uncorrupted by the plethora of other acts that often pose as forgiveness or pass for it, due to surface similarities (OF, 32). He argues that in its pure expression, “forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable,” and he explains this apophatically, by exposing what it could not be: forgiveness of the forgivable (32). Forgiveness of the forgivable has three consequences: the power problem (Derrida calls it sovereignty), the transaction problem (Derrida calls it economy), and the ceremonial problem. I will begin by explaining these three problems, thus showing what forgiveness is not. I will then explain how Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac exemplifies the giving of a gift in a religious context and use Derrida’s exploration of this account in The Gift of Death to illuminate what forgiveness positively might be. This, it turns out is difficult to do, as every turn ends in a paradox. I will end by drawing out the implications of the impossible paradox in our own practice of giving—whether it be forgiveness, love, or any other good thing.
The power problem comes from the fact that dividing crimes into “forgivable” and “unforgivable” implies the existence of someone with the authority of classifying crimes into these categories. If a crime can be classified publicly as “forgivable,” everyone is tacitly stating that forgiveness is possible conditionally. And once it is conditional, there is somebody tabulating conditions, someone who decides what about this particular crime or its context makes it worthy of forgiveness, in contrast with other crimes that do not meet the mark. This is a form of subjection. For example, if my standard is remorse, then when my standard is met and I respond with forgiveness, I am tossing a largess from the moral high ground that I have designated through my power (OF, 35). And if I say I will forgive unconditionally, I assume “the power of forgiving,” which Derrida seems to think always implies some sort of corruption (58). If my act of giving can be characterized this way, it is not really giving. In this act, I am taking something, namely power and self-affirmation.
The second problem is that once the conditions have been judged to be right, and the crime is now “forgivable,” forgiveness is unnecessary because has already been replaced by a transaction. After looking at the conditions for his forgiveness, the criminal who wants forgiveness pays the victim according to these conditions (for example, by giving the victim the satisfaction of remorse). Then, when the victim “forgives” the criminal, all he is really doing is telling him that justice has been done, and he is satisfied. Forgiving the forgivable is thus something much more akin to punishment. Punishment expiates a crime by inflicting a harm on the criminal that is proportional to his crime. It is paid out as the crime deserves, as the criminal has earned it. Here, in the case of this “forgiveness,” forgiveness is also paid out as the crime deserves, as the criminal has earned it. It is just that, perhaps the victim does not think that harm would satisfy his desire for justice; he would rather see the criminal re-formed in a different way.
The third possible consequence of forgiving the forgivable is that the crime itself is not forgiven but merely avoided through the sham of public ceremony. If it can be called “forgivable,” that means the blatant badness of the act that made it a crime in the first place has been given excuses, so that people can ignore dealing with it (often in order to avoid beginning an endless feud of revenge, a life for a life, repeated forever, or for “closure”). Returning to our example of the condition of remorse, say that the penitent is “forgiven.” The problem is that the person “forgiven” is no longer the criminal but the penitent (OF, 39). So, the act is ceremony again, a sham masquerading as truth. The criminal has been executed in effigy by his act of penance. He is ceremonially dead. The crime has not been forgiven. It has been “paid” for in fake money, so that people can avoid the ugly task of collecting the real debt. In this case, “forgiveness” is simply saying, “It is not worth it to demand justice. Let’s just avoid thinking about it. Forgive and forget.”
Derrida calls this sham forgiveness the “universal idiom of law … politics … economy … diplomacy” (OF, 28). The word “idiom” seems odd here, but upon some unpacking, serves as a cogent metaphor. An idiom is a figure of speech that belongs to a particular group. It is like a linguistic inside joke; it binds the sharers of a common language together, not because it is difficult to grasp its logic but precisely because the phrase lacks an internal logic and must therefore be learned through contextual use (Why do “cold feet” signify being afraid? If there is no clear answer, it must be an idiom.) If this idiom is “universal,” it must bind all of mankind together in this way. But, like an idiom, the meaning inherent to this act is absent, leaving only the shell of an act that is defined purely by its common use. These political statements of forgiveness are ceremony (29).
To avoid these problems, forgiveness must be non-hierarchical, non-transactional, and non-ceremonial. When they are stated in these convenient words, these stipulations seem quite satisfactory. But just a little unpacking of the implications of each term reveals a terrible inscrutability at the heart of forgiveness. If it is devoid of desire for power, desire for remuneration, and the cowardice and ulterior motives of ceremony, it is nothing but something given unconditionally.
Dwelling on this condition of unconditionality brings out the internal contradiction of the concept—its impossibility. To lack conditions is to lack context. One cannot describe where, when, or why forgiveness is granted. There is no rationale to the act, and there is therefore nothing to be said of it, except that, against all likelihood, it was enacted. In its unlikeliness, when used as a response to the unforgivable, the act of forgiveness lacks even a rationale that could be imposed upon it by an observer. There is literally no possible narrative, no story a reporter could write for his newspaper. One sits in silence, gaping, and whispers, “He is mad.” And perhaps the reporter could speculate about the biography of the forgiver and what led to his madness, but the reporter cannot consider the actual act in any way except in commenting on its nonsense, which is to say, ignoring it as an act. This alienates forgiveness completely from the concept of a forgiveness that “must rest on a human possibility” (OF, 37). This forgiveness is, in its illegibility, impossible.
It is therefore no surprise that Derrida gives no example of forgiveness in his essay; he does, however, get close to giving an example in The Gift of Death, and it is a fearsome one—the Kierkegaardian interpretation of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac to God on Mount Moriah. Derrida directly connects the sacrifice of Isaac to forgiveness by comparing the sacrifice to Christ’s rejection of “eye for eye” retribution and command to “turn the other cheek” (102). What this act is, in its denial of transaction or power or ceremony, is the gift of forgiveness, “forgiving the unforgivable.” Though sacrifice is not identical to forgiveness, insofar as they are gifts, acts that avoid the three problems sketched in the first part of the paper, they are functionally the same.
A gift, in its unconditionality, is an action that is entirely owned by the giver—it is the pinnacle of responsibility. Derrida, however, points out that responsibility contains a self-contradiction that seems to make its pure form impossible to realize. It asks “an accounting, a general answering-for-oneself with respect to the general and before the generality” but simultaneously “uniqueness, absolute singularity … secrecy” (GD, 61). The first requires my “owning up” to own’s actions by proving by publicly accepted standards that I was not crazy, but did it on purpose, that I can stand by my action (60). The second is necessary because I must carry this decision by myself in order to really own the action. Nobody can have sympathy and thus take part in my action.
This paradox characterizes the situation Kierkegaard describes in Fear and Trembling. Abraham must keep his sacrifice secret because if he were to tell his family what he planned to do, they would argue with him (GD, 73). And if he were to argue back, he would have to justify himself in the language of ethical generality, which would shift the responsibility off from Abraham’s shoulders, placing it on the source of those ethical arguments, which is society (60). If these occurred, he would no longer be in a special relationship with the transcendent because he no longer commits the murder for the transcendent God; instead, it is only for the God who is subject to social norms. Once he justifies his act with ethics, due to a desire to preserve himself from criticism, Abraham no longer gives something to God unconditionally (70). He only gives it on the condition that he has public sympathy.
So, instead of doing this, Abraham fulfills the paradox of responsibility through the silence of crime. He agrees to take everything on himself by killing his son without any public justification. Yet he answers for himself publicly by submitting to the legal consequence of his action: being condemned to death as a murderer (GD, 66). People may do many things for me as my substitute, but they cannot die in my place. They can die to give me a few more years of life, but eventually, the time comes when I must go, and I alone. Abraham, when he considers himself bound by ethics and yet transgresses it, betraying the whole world, the world of his Mitmenschen, those he loves, undergoes a living death. He leaves the common world to which he belongs because “this man would surely be condemned by any civilized society” (85). In killing Isaac, he kills himself.
Only when he has given this gift, can Abraham receive a gift from God—the life of his son. God rewards Abraham because “he renounced calculation” (GD, 97). When I give nothing, I also will receive nothing. My relationship with God will be transactional because I have chosen never to go beyond transaction. He will give me only what you are due. On the other hand, when I suspend the norms for the sake of the other, I can recognize that God reciprocally suspends the norms for me and accept his unreasonably gigantic gift. So, while transaction is cancelled at one level, it seems to remain at another. This is, however, necessary, for the non-transactional to occur. If God bestows an unconditional gift, and I receive it in an entitled way as a reimbursement for my good deeds and am not surprised by it, it is no longer a gift. The problem also occurs if he gives me the gift and I do good deeds in return to reimburse him. A gift is “outside of any economy … without any hope of exchange, reward, circulation, or communication” (96). So, to prepare myself to receive gifts, I must understand what it means to give a gift, which I can only do by giving without hope of any reimbursement. Though it is a “simulacrum” of transaction, keeping a surface-level appearance, this exchange occurs for the sake that it not be transactional, so that when God does give a gift, it can stay a gift (109).
Each stage in this account of gift-giving seems to make sense because it is intuitive that a gift is the opposite of a transaction—and yet, there seems to be a hole in the account. The paradoxes, contradictions, dissatisfactions disturb the narrative, prevent it from closing. Justice is completely understandable and natural because it is nothing more complicated than exchanging one thing for another of equal value. Justice is logical. It is 2+2=4. The fearsome and strange thing about these concepts Derrida discusses—love, gift, forgiveness, unconditional, responsibility, and sacrifice—is that in their defiance of economy, they state something like 2+2=5. And if language and life is logical, these things are indescribable and unlivable—and yet we recognize them, talk about them, and live them. So, Derrida calls them a revelation that reason gives us at the place its powers end “the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit, at its death and finitude” (GD, 68). They exist and we use them every day, and yet we cannot know them because to know them would destroy them. Yet its very unknowability is why the unconditional “surprises, like a revolution, the ordinary course of history, politics, and law,” providing hope for change in an often systematically oppressive world (39).
People are limited, and the world is flawed. But our ability to conceive of this kind of purity and perfection opens the possibility of possibility. If not everything is transaction, then not everything is determined. If people can conceive of an ideal, then they can fall forward in such a way that they always know they are failing but that they can always work at refining, never satisfied with the immediate expression of the transcendent. It is good to be aware of the empirical data of fallibility – that Peter denied Christ three times for fear of a child. But it is degrading to stop there. The limitation imposed by transcendence is accompanied by a constant dissatisfaction and a constant hope. A few weeks after he denied Christ, Peter experienced a fleeting taste of the freedom and perfection of the transcendent in the miracle of Pentecost, when the Spirit took him beyond himself and brought transcendent words to his tongue.
Transcendence means “climbing over,” but Derrida describes a transcendence that simply never will be climbed over. It is more like an ecstasy, “standing outside oneself” in contemplation of something beyond self-expression that reminds one that there is always something better to aspire to than the status quo. The past may be closed, but according to Derrida, by continuing to forgive and love and sacrifice, though we cannot understand these acts, we ensure that the future remains open.