Seeking Forgiveness (Jacques Derrida)

Abstract

This paper offers a reading of Jacques Derrida's concept of forgiveness, in relation to what he and Jean-Luc Nancy call ‘the deconstruction of Christianity’. Against a certain powerful tradition of the Enlightenment, which extends from Voltaire to Heidegger (including Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche), Derrida and Nancy argue that it is not possible today to speak from a position that is purely and simply disenchanted from what is called religion, and in particular, from an experience of faith. This audacious claim does not, despite appearances, mean the abandonment of all critical and deconstructive vigilance with regard to the metaphysical heritage of Christianity (and/or monotheism in general) but rather, I would argue, a deeper, more responsible way of addressing it.

Notes

² A striking contemporary example of the ‘worldwidization of forgiveness’ is recent apologies from the Zen community in Japan for complicity with the Japanese military during World War Two – complicity which included giving justification to policies of invasion and colonisation; and in particular, ‘spiritual education’ to Kamakazi pilots prior to their missions. Significantly, these public apologies, which acknowledge a submerged and largely unknown history, were issued shortly after 11 September 2001 (see Victoria 2006, 2003).

¹ Derrida prefers to use term ‘Abrahamic’ to designate an idiom of apology, reconciliation, and forgiveness, which is the shared inheritance of the three great monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. However, it is clear what he is most concerned with is the Jewish and in particular, Christian appropriations of this idiom (Derrida 1995a).

³ Consider, for example, critical readings of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (see Grunebaum 2002; Mamdani 2001).

⁴ Derrida resists translating ‘mondialisation’ as globalisation, because of the particular resonances of ‘world’ (mundus) rather than globe, cosmos or universe, even though ‘mondialisation’ is also the French translation of globalisation. The significance of the reference to world or mundus in the term mondialisation is that it keeps the memory of a Christianisation of the Greek: ‘Le monde, ce n'est ni l'univers, ni le cosmos. Même quand saint Paul a parlé de cosmos pour designer le monde Chrétien, il affectait le mot de cosmos d'une nouvelle signification qui signifiant l'ordre de créatures, de la fraternité des hommes comme prochain, etc…quand on dit mondialisation il faut se rappeler cette mémoire qui est à la fois théologique et philosophique et le mot de globalisation perd la référence à cette mémoire-là’ (Derrida 2001b: 67–8; Nancy 2002: 21; ‘Philosophie et mondialisation’ 2007: 21).

⁵ ‘What matters is not the Christian marks bourn by the West that are so visible and numerous, and of which the Cross is like an abbreviation. On the contrary, what matters is that Christianity is present – and perhaps above all – where it is not possible to recognize it … for example a certain concept of “human rights” as well as a determination of the relationship between politics and religion come directly from Christianity’. (Nancy 2005: 53; translation mine)

⁶ The thesis of atheism as realised Christianity is related to the formulation of Marcel Gauchet adopted by Nancy that ‘Christianity is the religion of religion's exit’. On the non-contradiction between atheism and faith (see Caputo et al. 2005: 36–8).

⁷ In the same interview, Derrida makes the point that the word ‘deconstruction’ is more closely related to Christianity than to Judaism or Islam, inasmuch as it refers to Heidegger's Destruktion and to Luther's destruuntur : ‘But the fact that it is literally linked to Christianity does not mean that Christianity is more deconstructive than other religions’. Nancy continues: ‘la déconstruction…est elle-même chrétienne. Elle est chrétienne parce que le christianisme est, d'origine, déconstructeur, parce qu'il se rapporte d'emblée à sa propre origine comme à un jeu, à un intervalle, un battement, une ouverture dans l'origine’ (2005: 217).

⁸ The designation ‘metaphysical’ is understood here with reference to Heidegger's determination of the history of Western thought as the forgetting of the difference between being (Sein) and beings (Seinende). This forgetting speaks out, for example, in the understanding of God as an existing or absolute being which is present as an essence or substance (ousia). Indeed it speaks out in any interpretation of being which is grounded and guaranteed by a presence (Idea, ens summum, Subject, Will). The term ‘metaphysical’ should also be related to Derrida's re-reading of Heidegger's ontological difference in terms of the phonocentrism, logocentrism, phallocentrism and finally, carnophallogocentrism of the history of Western thought (Cadava et al. 1991; Derrida 1967). For the ontological difference, see Heidegger 1978; Nancy 2005: 16.

⁹ ‘Belief or faith has no place in thought’ (Derrida 1998). See also the exclusion of theology from philosophy as fundamental ontology (Heidegger 1978).

¹⁰ Following Benveniste, Derrida recalls that, within the Latin sphere, the origin of religio has been the subject of two competing but nonetheless commensurate readings: relegere (supported by Cicero): ‘bringing together in order to return and begin again’; and religare (Lactantius and Tertullian): ‘linking religion to the link, precisely, to obligation, ligament, and hence to obligation, to debt, etc’. Whatever side one takes in this debate, it is to the ellipse of these double Latin foci that the entire modern (geo-theologico-political) problematic of the ‘return of the religious’ refers. Whoever would not acknowledge either the legitimacy of this double foci or the Christian prevalence that has imposed itself globally within the said Latinity would have to refuse the very premises of such a debate. And with them, any attempt to think a situation in which, as in times past, there will perhaps no longer exist, just as once it did not yet exist, any common Indo-European term for ‘religion’ (Derrida 2002a: 36–8).

¹¹The word Pâques in French can mean both Passover and Ester (Weber 2005: 113–4).

¹² As Yirmiyahu Yovel has noted in his study of Marranism, Judaism was guarded only in a ‘fragmentary and distorted manner’. Information about it was often gleaned from ‘polemical works against it, the Latin Vulgate and other Christian sources’. The residual Judaism of Marranism was, according to Yovel, a hybrid mixture of religions, ‘fraught with Christian symbols and categories’, making it appear both Christian and Jewish, and neither (Yovel 1989: 15–39; see also Yovel 2008).

¹³ For Arendt, forgiveness is a mode of action, which corresponds to a new beginning: “Handeln als Neuanfangen entspricht der Geburt des Jemand, es realisiert in jedem Einzelnen die Tatsache des Geborenseins' (Arendt 1999: 217).

¹⁴ See Derrida's interpretations of a Jewish Joke recounted by Theodor Reik (Derrida 1997a: 131–65; Derrida 2002: 397–8). In his memoirs, the Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor, Simon Wiesenthal, makes the observation that ‘people who have once laughed together do not want to kill one another anymore’ (1988: 424).

¹⁵ Heidegger's epigram for Being and Time from Plato's Sophist: ‘For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression “being” (wenn ihr den Ausdruck, seiend’ gebraucht). We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed (in Verlegenheit gekommen)' (1978: 19f).

¹⁶ The term ‘symptom’ is loosely employed here as referring to a formation, which testifies to an unconscious conflict.

¹⁷ ‘The only possible pardon is really the impossible pardon … I don't believe the pardon defined in that way rightly belongs in the public, political, juridical, or even ethical field. Which is why its secret is so serious and important an issue’ (Derrida 2005: 161, 2008: 121–9).

¹⁸ J. Derrida Lecture given at Columbia University, October 2002.

¹⁹ In his famous sketch, Kant designated perpetual peace as a ‘sweet dream’, which is to say that which does not exist in the present. In her reading of Kant's sketch, Avital Ronell writes: ‘The problem that Kant faces in the entire essay involves the deflection of perpetual peace from its semantic hole in the graveyard: could there be a movement of peace that is unhitched from the death drive? Must the duty we have toward peace have as its background music that radical tranquility which resonates with “rest in peace”? If Kant can only draw a philosophical sketch of peace, this is because his leanings push him toward the edge of undecidability where absolute peace, like war, means you're dead’ (Ronell 1998: 286).

²⁰ ‘Philosophical discourse is not only governed by the phantasmatic (either originary or derived), but, more seriously, can no longer be assured of possessing a philosophical concept of the phantasm, a knowledge that would control what is at issue in this word … . What happens if the absolute phantasm is co-extensive with absolute knowledge? It should be possible to demonstrate … that the philosophic is the phantasmatic’ (Derrida 1995b: 23).