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Chapter 1

Derrida

On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness

In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001), a text that was published as part of Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney’s co-edited book series, “Thinking in Action,” Derrida critiques global political affairs through his deconstructions of the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism.¹ The text is comprised of two distinct sections, the first is based on an address given to the International Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg (1996)—a speech entitled, Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!—and the second is based on answers Derrida gave in an interview on the subject of forgiveness for the French journal Le Monde des débats (December 1999). Presenting deconstructions of two ideas with conceptual roots deep in le héritage, which is to say, the Western tradition, Derrida responds—with his distinctive philosophic approach—to events and phenomenon taking place around the globe.

In the first part of his book, Derrida critically evaluates the legacy of cosmopolitan thought, doing so not simply as an exercise in abstract theorizing, but in the mode of a pointed criticism of the rising anti-immigrant sensibility in France during the 1980s and 1990s.² The second part of the book presents his deconstruction of the notion of forgiveness, in a manner congruent with his examination of cosmopolitanism, calling into question instances of political (re)conciliatory action that were, increasingly, a prominent part of global public life. Because it was “not only individuals, but also entire communities, professional corporations, the representatives of ecclesiastical hierarchies, sovereigns, and heads of state” who were now asking for “forgiveness,” Derrida saw fit to deconstruct the concept of forgiveness as a means of critically considering its association with the cases of repentance, confession, and apology that were “multiplying” on the “geopolitical scene” during the final years of the twentieth century.³ More than a form of detached, apolitical analysis, the deconstructivist approach practiced by Derrida in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness reveals the conceptual underpinnings supporting these two notions in a manner that allows him to engage actively—or to intervene philosophically—in global political affairs.

What precisely, however, does Derrida mean when he speaks and writes about “deconstruction”? And in what ways, specifically, does this form of philosophic thought allow him to take action, and to intervene ethically and politically in the realm of human affairs? At first glance, we might wonder whether—given the similarities between Derrida’s notion of deconstruction and Heidegger’s practice of reading the history of Western metaphysics destructively (as in Destruktion)—a deconstructivist approach is incommensurable with a care-centric mode of thought, especially one which prioritizes the conservation and re-construction of the world within which we live, move, and act politically. Furthermore, in concluding that the purpose of deconstruction is not simply to destroy ideas, concepts, themes, and so on in what ways does it facilitate more positive, regenerative action? How does a Derridean deconstruction of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness contribute to the (re)creation of what might be considered a better—arguably more just—world through its thoroughly critical, destructive mode of engaging with the basic structures, concepts, and beliefs that inform, constitute, and condition the human experience of being in the world? It is in seeking answers to these questions that I begin my reflections on cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, doing so not because there is a need to rethink the practice of deconstruction in and of itself, but because a Derridean deconstructivist approach reveals the conceptual logic undergirding each of these notions: informing the Derridean experience of justice that I reconsider in terms of the “world.”

Divided into three sections, I first provide an overview of Derrida’s deconstructive approach, before turning to his deconstructions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism specifically. Accordingly, section one highlights how deconstruction is a genealogical form of criticism animated by a hyperbolic sense of justice. The second and third sections of this chapter investigate the conceptual logics inherent to the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, respectively, with Derrida’s deconstructions facilitating an exposition of the binary oppositions that undergird each of these ideas. These are the aporetic binaries that inform the underlying conceptual dynamics which I theorize throughout the remainder of this book—Arendt’s body of thought serving as a compass with which to navigate the ethico-political terrain uncovered by deconstruction. Responding to the series of aporias disclosed by Derrida’s deconstructivist account of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, I fashion a theory of political action shaped by Arendt’s notion of “care for the world.”

1. Derrida, Deconstruction, and “Undecidability”

Rejecting the existence of a rigid divide between theory and practice,⁴ Derrida’s philosophic project of deconstruction—a form of thinking in action—“aspires to change things and to intervene [. . .] in what one calls the cité, the polis, and more generally the world.”⁵ Not unlike the philosophy of praxis outlined within Marxist thought, according to which philosophic interventions do not simply interpret the world but seek to change it, deconstruction can be understood as a type of “performative interpretation” that puts thinking into action in a manner that demands, as Marx writes, “a ruthless criticism of everything existing.”⁶ As a form of “ruthless criticism,” deconstruction puts into practice a characteristically active mode of critical philosophic inquiry, one which is animated by a hyperbolic sense of justice. It is, as Critchley and Kearney observe, a “concrete intervention in contexts that is governed by an undeconstructable concern for justice.”⁷ Though it has long been acknowledged—both by Derrida himself and by scholars of his work—that defining deconstruction poses certain intrinsic challenges, perhaps even proving to be impossible because of the ways in which the word “deconstruction” itself “acquires its value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions,”⁸ Critchley and Kearney’s description of the Derridean approach provides a sturdy foundation upon which to develop our thinking about this form of “ruthless criticism” in two primary ways.

First, to frame how Derrida understands the complex web of meaning that supports and structures all of human existence, Critchley and Kearney underscore that deconstruction is an “intervention in contexts.” This notion of “context” is significant for a Derridean conceptualization of human existence because he understands the world as “text,” which—as he writes in Limited Inc (1988)—is “limited neither to the graphic, nor to the book, nor even to discourse, and even less to the semantic, representation, symbolic, ideal, or ideological sphere.”⁹ What he describes as “text” implies all “structures called ‘real,’ ‘economic,’ ‘historical,’ socio-institutional, in short: all possible referents.”¹⁰ Including “all possible referents,” and thus referring to the entire semiological system of signs and their correlates, the “text” is the linguistic system of writing—more specifically what he describes as “archi-écriture” (or arche-writing)—that encapsulates all of human affairs. This conceptualization of textuality and (arche-)writing—with its ontological claim that the present is shaped by a play of “différance,” according to which “language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted ‘historically’ as a weave of differences”¹¹ —gives rise to the now infamous notion that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”¹² Though the suggestion that “there is nothing outside the text”—or, alternatively translated, that “there is no outside-text”—has garnered much criticism from thinkers such as Michel Foucault and John Searle, it is—for Derrida—but another means of saying that “there is nothing outside context.”¹³ The etymological root, derived from the Latin “con,” meaning “together” or “with,” and “texere,” to “weave, to make, to fabricate,” gives us a definition in the Oxford English Dictionary of the “continuous text or composition with parts duly connected”; or the “whole structure of a connected passage regarded in its bearing upon any of the parts which constitute it; the parts which immediately precede or follow any particular passage of ‘text’ and determine its meaning.” Conjuring the image of a fabric, this is an understanding of “textuality” that Derrida develops from Edmund Husserl’s work, considering an object of enquiry not only as an object in and of itself but as part of a broader fabric of (non)discursive forces.¹⁴ To deconstruct an aspect of the “text” is, thus, effectively to unravel the entirety of this textile, purposefully cutting into and through its various constituent parts, layers, seams, etc. in order to inspect forensically the very fibers of its being.

Derrida’s deconstructive intervention is therefore a cutting into “context,” doing so in such a manner that he moves into the “text”—as Critchley and Kearney observe—“via an analysis that is at once historical, contextual, and thematic, to bring out the logic of the concept.”¹⁵ This movement, or “conceptual genealogy,”¹⁶ is what I present here in Benjaminian terms, seeking to understand how the “pearl” that the metaphorical “pearl diver” has retrieved and—“resuscitated” in Arendt’s own Benjaminian language—has come to be formed at the bottom of the ocean in the first place.¹⁷ When thinking about cosmopolitanism and forgiveness as “pearls,” for instance, it is not only interesting to contemplate the genealogical narratives of these notions, but also to consider the broader systems of meaning that inform how such “pearls” presently appear and exist to us as valuable entities. To think deconstructively is thus to begin to understand that the very possibility of the existence of “pearls” is dependent on the seeming impossibility of an irritant—usually a parasite and not the proverbial grain of sand—becoming enveloped by nacre and “crystallized” into a thing of luster and value. In the words of Nicholas Royle, deconstruction is “the experience of the impossible; what remains to be thought; a logic of destabilization always already on the move in ‘things themselves’; [. . .] a theoretical and practical parasitism or virology; what is happening today in what is called society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on: the opening of the future itself.”¹⁸ This experience of thinking the impossible—or of the possibility of something like a pearl becoming possible in terms of its impossibility—is deconstruction, which is the very “performative interpretation” that realizes this conceptual dynamic and allows us to understand the broader context of this entity’s existence in today’s world. Thus, when Critchley and Kearney write about how deconstruction is a “concrete intervention in contexts,” they are describing a foray into an all-encompassing “text” through a study of particular “things”—or “pearls”—whose history and meaningfulness have been shaped by the interplay of the (non)discursive, (non-)present forces that inform their worldly existence.

In addition to the ways in which deconstruction is an “intervention in contexts,” Critchley and Kearney—as part of their introductory remarks to On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness—also note that this form of “ruthless criticism” is “governed by an undeconstructable concern for justice.” Though this is a conceptualization of justice which has notable affinities to the hyper-ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, it is foremost necessary to note that the possibility of acting justly can only be said to take place during instances of sheer “undecidability.” For Derrida, “undecidability” is associated with the paralyzing experience of not knowing what to do when we are forced to think and act in the face of the impossible, when no rules or formulas can be applied to address a well-defined “problem”: this is an “experience” which is “heterogenous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, [but] is still obliged [. . .] to give itself up to the impossible decision.”¹⁹ Such an experience is characteristic of the aporetic dynamics of (im)possibility ever at play in notions like cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. Having written extensively on the notion of a “problem,” Derrida puts this word “in tension with” the Greek word, “aporia.”²⁰ Where a “problem” is a “prosthesis that we put forth in order to represent, replace, shelter, or dissimulate ourselves, or so as to hide something unavowable,” an “aporia” is a matter of “not knowing where to go,” an experience of impossibility that “separates us in the very place where it would no longer be possible to constitute a problem.”²¹ The characteristic experience of the aporia is the “non-passage,” of not knowing what to do, and it is “the point where the very project or problematic task becomes impossible and where we are all exposed, absolutely without protection, without problem [. . .] that is to say [. . .] incapable of sheltering ourselves behind what could still protect the interiority of a secret.”²² Thus, to think deconstructively about notions—for instance, cosmopolitanism and forgiveness—is to attend directly to the undecidable relations of (im)possibility that structure particular ideas, words, concepts, themes, and so on; these are the conceptual dynamics that gave rise to the “mad” experience of the aporia—a type of “madness of the impossible”—that engenders the ethical demand to think and act more justly in the world.²³

We may be justified, perhaps, in wondering how the experience of undecidability is a matter of “justice.” We might ask how, for instance, Derrida’s understanding of the experience of the impossible possibility gives rise to the sense of responsibility that leads him to believe that “deconstruction is justice”?²⁴ How does a Derridean approach to deconstruction act for the sake of justice? Though these questions take root in various places throughout Derrida’s corpus, his responses to them are fundamentally shaped by his reading of Levinas’s work (notably in his essay “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”²⁵ ), with a Levinasian notion of ethicality directly informing the sense of responsibility that powers Derridean deconstruction. Critchley, too, in Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (1999), investigates the relationship between the work of Derrida and Levinas:

Derrida paradoxically defines justice as an experience of that which we are not able to experience, which is qualified as “the mystical,” “the impossible,” or “aporia” [. . .] justice in an “experience” of the undecidable. However, and this is crucial, such an undecidable experience of justice does not arise in some intellectual intuition or theoretical deduction, rather it always arises in relation to a particular entity, to the singularity of the other [. . .] that is to say, justice arises in the particular and non-subsumptive relation to the Other, as a response to suffering that demands an infinite responsibility.²⁶

Here, Critchley highlights Derrida’s theoretical indebtedness to Levinas, a thinker known for his idiosyncratic notion of alterity and his understandings of ethics as first philosophy. Critchley draws our attention to the ways in which a Derridean understanding of undecidability—in its “relation to a particular entity, to the singularity of the other”—is shaped by a Levinasian notion of otherness, whereby—for Levinas—the “face” of the Other is that which “governs me, whose infinity I cannot thematize and whose hostage I remain.”²⁷ This is an ethically charged conceptualization of alterity, one which Critchley suggests generates a “pre-reflective sentient disposition towards the Other’s suffering that [forms] a basis for ethics and responsibility.”²⁸ This is an ethic that Derrida carries into his approach to deconstruction; specifically, it is an Other-oriented sense of ethics that forms the beating heart of his notion of justice.

Differing from the sense of justice associated with the law (as droit), the justice of Derridean deconstruction aligns with Levinas’s notion of la droiture de l’accueil fait au visage,²⁹ or—as translated by Derrida—“the equitable honoring of faces.”³⁰ Though Derrida’s translation of this excerpt is sometimes contested,³¹ this is a conceptualization of justice animated by an infinite responsibility to the (unknown) Other, a form of concern for a singular being who is always—though this figure might not be present in the world—owed respect and an equity of treatment. This is an obligation to the ipseity of the Other—someone whose appearance Derrida describes in Levinasian terms as the “arrival” of “God”³² —that he associates with our movement toward and through the aporetic experience engendered during moments of undecidability, which is to say, an injunction to extend as far as humanly possible our care, concern, love, and so on to all whom appear before us. Informed by this infinite, unceasing demand to act responsibly in the “face” of the (unknown) Other, deconstruction is thus—arguably—a characteristically Other-centric form of philosophic action. A type of Other-oriented mode of thought, deconstruction, is performed for the sake of the Other and a more just treatment of them. I use the word “them” here because the “Other” is both a singular being, and yet, not representative of a singular person at all, but rather the multitude of all humanity. Not unlike the notion of “dying to the self” found in the Christian tradition of faith, which demands a relinquishment of a self-centric existence and the putting into practice of a radical sense of beingness toward the infinite (God); a Levinasian understanding of acting responsibly toward the (unknown) Other is a call of and for a justice which is ultimately unfathomable, without limits, and free from any worldly conditions.

But what are the political implications of such a radically Other-oriented ethics? How can this transcendental notion of justice, as it relates to deconstruction, cultivate new spaces and forms of democratic action? That is, in what ways—if at all possible—does this extreme form of ethics conserve and enhance “the political”? With these questions in mind, I turn my attention to Derrida’s deconstructions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, proceeding on the conceptual grounds that his approach offers a “concrete intervention in contexts” that is “governed” by a radical “concern for justice.” I go forward with the belief that Derrida’s approach—because of the ways in which it operates, as Critchley observes, in a “quasi-transcendental register”³³ —arguably neglects to account adequately for the political necessity of thinking and acting caringly for that which is shared with the “Other”: the “world.”

2. Derrida: On Forgiveness

Corresponding with Derrida’s turn to more thoroughly ethical and political topics in the 1990s, his examination of forgiveness offers a “concrete” philosophic intervention during a period when humanity saw “the proliferation of scenes of repentances or of asking ‘forgiveness.’”³⁴ Against this backdrop, he saw it necessary to critique how forgiveness—a decidedly Judeo-Christian notion—was being practiced and instrumentalized by individuals and groups from all across the (international) political spectrum, as well as individuals and nongovernmental actors from across (global) civil society. Acting into this “context,” which must be understood here in a double sense, as both the so-called real world where human affairs are taking place, and the all-encompassing “text” within which all meanings are ascribed, Derrida’s reflections on forgiveness offer a deconstructive critique—a “conceptual genealogy”—of a notion with conceptual roots extending deep into the Western tradition of thought: investigating how this idea has been understood and practiced throughout human history.

Contending that there is not “anything secular in our time,”³⁵ Derrida argues that the contemporary world exists within a state of “globalatinisation [which] takes into account the effect of Roman Catholicism [that] today overdetermines all language of law, of politics, and even the interpretation of what is called the ‘return of the religious.’”³⁶ Underscoring the hegemonic influence that religion has had on human existence in the West, Derrida suggests that forgiveness is an idea that is inseparable from its foundations in Christian teachings. In this way, his thinking is in line with that of Arendt when she writes:

The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense.³⁷

Derrida, who maintains that even the notion of “the secular” is a religious one,³⁸ consequently affirms Arendt’s understanding that the religious foundations of the concept of forgiveness are significant, but do not prevent its being theorized/practiced in secular contexts. Although the tendency in the contemporary (international) political arena—both scholastically and practically—is to separate the secular from the non-secular, attempting to ground the doing of politics in nonreligious terms, this is not entirely possible when considering forgiveness, as the influence of Judeo-Christian precepts to the practice of this particular notion are undeniable. Secular scholars who study, and practitioners who do politics, therefore ought not be thwarted by the rootedness of forgiveness in Christian theology, though they must take into account how this “pearl” has been “crystallized” in terms of the ethics outlined within this tradition of faith.

A. Unconditional Forgiveness and Conditional “Forgiveness”

Derrida identifies two strands of forgiveness within the Christian tradition: the supernatural, unconditional and the human, conditional forms of this notion. In writing of the former, he highlights the “radical”³⁹ character of forgiveness that is articulated repeatedly throughout the New Testament: the infinite, unmitigated form of forgiving related to the unconditional imperative to love one’s neighbor (agape). Like the unqualified, unquantifiable conception of love found in—for instance—Jesus’s Parable of the Prodigal Son,⁴⁰ an unconditional form of forgiveness is associated with what Derrida calls a “hyperbolic ethics,” which is an ethics that “tends to push the exigency to the limit and beyond the limit of the possible.”⁴¹ A hyperbolic ethics is an “ethics beyond ethics,” for it “carries itself beyond laws, norms or any obligation.”⁴² This pure form of forgiveness, if there is such a thing at all, is found in the realm of the hyperbolic, and it demands “the unconditional, gracious, infinite, aneconomic forgiveness granted to the guilty as guilty, without counterpart, even to those who do not repent or ask forgiveness.”⁴³ From this perspective, forgiveness is not characterized by pragmatism, proportionality, or the execution of a set of well-defined procedures. Rather, it possesses a certain unfathomable, unbounded, and unconditional quality that can only be understood, if it is even possible to understand at all, as a hyperbolic notion without quantifiable limits or conditional requirements.

By contrast, “conditional” forgiveness refers to that which is considered and commonly practiced within the human realm. For example, conditional forgiveness is associated with the semantics and the logic that informs the confession-forgiveness dynamic, as found in the Catholic confessional booth. In this space, a sinner confesses, repents, and apologizes for their sins as a means of asking for forgiveness from a priest, who—as a representative of God—has the power to absolve these indiscretions in return for a penance. For Derrida, this so-called forgiveness, which can be granted only after a wrongdoer satisfies certain conditions, cannot be understood as “forgiveness” at all. This is a point that he demonstrates in three primary ways.

First, a Derridean conception of “pure” forgiveness can take place only between two singularities—the wronged and the wrongdoer—and, thus, “as soon as a third party intervenes, one can speak of amnesty, reconciliation, reparation, etc., but certainly not of pure forgiveness.”⁴⁴ Therefore, the presence and intervention of a party other than the victim and the perpetrator—such as a priest, judge, or state legislator—eliminates forgiveness from this interaction. Within such spaces, one can only speak of reconciliation, restorative justice, retributive justice, or amnesty, but not forgiveness.

Second, Derrida contends that conditional forgiveness, as found in the confessional booth, can be construed as a form of reconciliation, justice, or even something else entirely, precisely because it is the product of a specific type of transaction. Because this process may demand truth-telling, call for an apology, require repentance, include a promise not to re-commit the wrong and/or, ultimately, may depend upon a penance in order for “forgiveness” to be granted, this act is characterized by a formulaic process and a certain negotiation between parties, which—Derrida argues—erodes the purity of forgiveness. Although he recognizes the utility of such a conditional process of reparation—especially as it pertains to the political realm and the pursuit of national reconciliation in the wake of sociopolitical conflict—he takes issue with the conditional logic of the exchange. He argues that a “pure” forgiveness cannot be qualified by certain terms and conditions.

Without delving too deeply into Derrida’s understanding of gifts and the relational process of gift giving, it is necessary at this point to highlight how an unconditional forgiveness is a gift truly given. That is, as he writes, “forgiveness must be a gracious gift, without exchange and without condition.”⁴⁵ Originally reflecting upon the idea of forgiveness in his native language of French, and therefore, on the French word pardon,⁴⁶ Derrida underscores how the French root word, don (ultimately from the Latin, donum, meaning “gift”), refers to the giving or donating of a gift; this is a point he uses as a means of illustrating the link between the notions of forgiveness and gifts. The logics of both these two concepts are aporetic in nature, for they are each characterized by the paradoxicality of the unconditional and the conditional, whereby a “pure” forgiveness and a “pure” gift must be “good,”⁴⁷ or—alternatively stated—be given without conditions and be free of a sovereignty that could establish a hierarchical relation of power between the donor and donee of this gift. According to Derrida, gifts purely and truly given are a type of “goodness,” or a “giving goodness,” whose “source remains inaccessible [to both parties].”⁴⁸ Stemming from a so-called goodness that is only accessible in terms of the “hyperbolic,” gifts—and thus forgiveness—must be given entirely without condition, which is to say, their being given must defy the logic of reciprocity. Describing a gift, Derrida states:

It must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle in the form of return to the point of departure. If the figure of the circle is essential to economics, the gift must remain aneconomic.⁴⁹

There can be no exchange or transactionality with regard to “pure” (for)giving, for the “goodness” of such a deed exceeds the conceptual bounds imposed by any logical and semantic conditions. Although Arendt does not theorize forgiveness in such transcendental, hyper-ethical terms, it is significant that she too emphasizes that acts of forgiveness are “aneconomic,” since it is an action that interrupts vicious cycles of violence and counterviolence. The “gift,” to foreshadow my subsequent discussion, is the new beginning that the act of forgiving instigates in both time and space.

Closely related to his observations about the gift-like nature of unconditional forgiveness is Derrida’s third criticism of conditional “forgiveness”: its teleological character, whereby forgiving is a means of achieving some end goal. Arguing that a “pure” forgiveness must not seek any predetermined end, Derrida is critical of how—for instance—the active pursuit of a reconciled relationship between actors, and/or a national healing, directly challenges the “infinite” quality of a “pure,” unconditional forgiveness. Because forgiveness—in its “pure” form—is unending, unfathomable, and thought to exceed human capability, it cannot serve as a means to an end. Again, Arendt similarly suggests that forgiveness cannot be considered or understood in utilitarian, instrumental terms because it is directly related to her theory of freedom, which is explored in chapters 2 and 4. In an effort to illustrate how forgiveness must be non-teleological and non-utilitarian, Derrida writes:

The language of forgiveness, at the service of determined finalities, [is] anything but pure [. . .] each time forgiveness is at the service of a finality, be it noble and spiritual (atonement or redemption, reconciliation, salvation), each time that it aims to re-establish a normality (social, national, political, psychological) by a work of mourning, by some therapy or ecology of memory, then the “forgiveness” is not pure—nor is its concept.⁵⁰

Summarizing this point, Ernesto Verdeja suggests that as “forgiveness becomes instrumentalized, it is drained of its transformative power and simply becomes a tool in a larger political and social project.”⁵¹ Unconditional forgiveness must therefore remain a “moral action in its own right,” and it must “eschew any telos of reconciliation.”⁵² It must not aim at, according to Derrida, a “finalized” forgiveness, since such a predetermined “forgiveness” is not forgiveness at all, as it is a “political strategy or a psycho-therapeutic economy.”⁵³ Unconditional forgiveness, then, is non-instrumental and serves no end, while the predetermined purpose-driven nature of a conditional “forgiveness” is related to an “economy of reparation” that facilitates the production of some end state.⁵⁴

Although Derrida calls into question the logistics, transactional character, and telos of a conditional “forgiveness,” he highlights that this conception is indissociable from the supernatural, unconditional understanding of it. Conditional forgiveness, which conforms to some type of predetermined, transactional process between parties, is fundamentally irreducible but nevertheless linked to the infinite, unfathomable understanding of unconditional forgiveness. Derrida argues that because unconditional forgiveness forms the essence of conditional forgiveness and because it is impossible to conceptualize pure forgiveness in human terms, the two forms of forgiveness cannot be dissociated from one another. As he states:

The unconditional and the conditional are, certainly, absolutely heterogeneous, and this forever, on either side of a limit, but they are also indissociable. There is in the movement, in the motion of unconditional forgiveness, an inner exigency of becoming-effective, manifest, determined, and, in determining itself, bending to conditionality.⁵⁵

Derrida argues that without its unconditional form, forgiveness is not a comprehensible concept. However, he also contends that because the actualization of a preternatural, “pure” forgiveness must assume a semantic—and therefore human—form (whether it be in the form of a spoken/written language, actions shared between parties, or some other exchange of meaning), the unconditional is inseparable from the conditional. It is impossible to think of, understand, grant or, ultimately, experience forgiveness without appealing simultaneously to both the “pure” and “impure” conceptions of this notion, even though it is only the “pure,” transcendental understanding of this idea—if such a thing exists at all—that can be truly understood as the unconditional “gift” of which he speaks.

B. Forgiveness and the Unforgivable

In addition to the aporetic relationship between the heterogeneous indissociability of the conditional and the unconditional, Derrida uncovers a second aporia that intersects with this initial paradox: that true forgiveness only forgives the unforgivable. In this regard, Derrida takes issue with the positions adopted by Arendt and thinkers like Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903–1985), both of whom focus on the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and both of whom affirm that the imprescriptibility of crimes committed inhibits the forgivability of such offenses. Jankélévitch famously claims that the act of “pardoning died in the death camps.”⁵⁶ He describes the atrocities of the Holocaust as “metaphysical crimes,” and he asserts that the “ontological wickedness” of the Nazis exceeded the scope of legal prescription precisely because their efforts aimed at the eradication of the “human essence or, if you will, the “hominity” of human beings in general.”⁵⁷ Like Jankélévitch, Arendt observes that when the concentration camps became “laboratories where changes in human nature [were] tested,” and when totalitarian regimes carried out the seemingly impossible task of rendering masses of people superfluous, the Nazis “discovered without knowing that there are crimes which men can neither punish nor forgive.”⁵⁸ She claims that “when the impossible was made possible it became the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil.”⁵⁹ Accordingly, Arendt writes:

Men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable [. . .] we can neither punish nor forgive such offenses and that they therefore transcend the realm of human affairs.⁶⁰

While Arendt’s position evolved over time, as the people of the world began to develop a political and legal language, or means of talking about and responding to genocidal atrocities, the crimes of the Holocaust were, initially, impossible to forgive because they defied the possibility of human understanding and, ultimately, humankind’s power to levy punishments. For both Arendt and Jankélévitch, then, the crimes against humanity committed under the reign of totalitarian governments originally marked a boundary between what is forgivable and what is unforgivable: delineating between the realm of human affairs and the realm of the preternatural.

Suggesting that the possibility of punishment cannot serve as the indicator of what is forgivable, Derrida takes issue with both Arendt and Jankélévitch’s positions. Derrida argues that the unforgivable character of a crime is that which, paradoxically, makes it possible to forgive. It is the unfathomable nature of unpunishable crimes that may be capable of being forgiven. In this sense, forgiveness only becomes possible at the point of the unforgivable, which—for both Arendt and Jankélévitch—are imprescriptible wrongs that exceed the bounds of human punishment. As Derrida summarizes:

Is [the unforgivable] not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? [. . .] If one is only prepared to forgive what appears forgivable, what the Church calls “venial sins,” then the very idea of forgiveness would disappear. If there is something to forgive it would be what in religious language is called mortal sin, the worst, the unforgivable crime or harm. From which comes the aporia, which can be described in its dry and implacable formality without mercy: forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable [. . .] there is only forgiveness, if there is any, where there is the unforgivable [. . .] forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself. It can only be possible in doing the impossible.⁶¹

Because punishments are practices levied by human institutions within human organizations, it must, by necessity, be possible for people to understand, issue, and administer them. In this sense, the prescriptibility of a crime is the antithesis of human impossibility because punishment—as a legal and/or sociopolitical practice—is inherently possible to enact within the human realm. Punishable crimes are those types of wrongs that cannot be forgiven because forgiveness—where the act of forgiving is true and pure—is infinite, unfathomable, and unconditional. For Derrida, “It is only against the unforgivable, and thus on the scale without scale, of a certain inhumanity of the inexpiable, against the monstrosity of radical evil that forgiveness, if there is such a thing, measures itself.”⁶² Forgiveness, from Derrida’s perspective, is therefore possible only in instances where punishment is impossible, for it is only those crimes which are impossible to fathom and punish that are worthy of the infinite, unconditionality of forgiveness. This foundational aspect of his understanding effectively means that forgiveness is fundamentally an other-worldly notion, an idea which I endeavor to re-world as a public, political practice of care.

C. The Power of Forgiveness

In asserting that forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable, Derrida not only demonstrates that forgiving emerges with the impossible, but also uncovers how forgiveness relates to power. In challenging Arendt and Jankélévitch’s positions on the nature of unforgivable crimes, Derrida questions the human power to punish—or the human capability to make decisions and administer judgments—which he contends “supposes a power, a force, a sovereignty.”⁶³ Each time forgiveness is effectively exercised, it supposes some sovereign power: the ability of a single party to demonstrate their power over others by way of a judgment that bestows a verdict upon a person or group of persons.⁶⁴ This display of power, understood in a Weberian sense of one party assuming power over another, is not characteristic of “pure” forgiveness because unconditional forgiving is related to a “hyperbolic ethic” that transcends the trappings of human “laws, norms, and obligations,” as well as the coercive dynamics of power that develop when individuals and groups have the ability to determine the fate of others. As a form of domination, “power over” is an aspect of human exchange that erodes the purity of forgiveness by introducing “sovereignty” into the transactional process of judgment.

This issue of “sovereignty” is significant for Derrida’s analysis of forgiveness because the dynamic of one party holding power over another can transform forgiving into a “poison” or a “weapon.”⁶⁵ Referring to his understanding of gifts and the act of gift giving, Derrida asserts that forgiveness is associated with a cycle of giving—arguing that giving is also a form of taking. Because he contends that to give is to set in motion a process of exchange, whereby the act of gifting someone something also invites a reciprocal action, whether it be a simple verbal expression of gratitude or a more grandiose gesture, he argues that there is a violent economy associated with the giving of gifts. Regarding this as a vicious cycle, Derrida posits that true gifts do not foster relations of exchange, when he writes that if there is a gift, “the given of the gift, [. . .] must not come back to the giving, [. . .] it must not circulate, [. . .] it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange.”⁶⁶ Gift giving must not instigate a reciprocal reaction, because gifts—if they are gifts truly and purely given—must not create an imbalance of power, whereby the recipient of a gift becomes indebted to the donating party. This debt, because it necessitates taking from the donee, is a form of harm. Gift giving becomes, according to Derrida, harmful the moment “the gift puts the other in debt, with the result that giving amounts to hurting, to doing harm.”⁶⁷ Derrida is consequently critical of how gifts can be used as a means for donors—as debtholders—to maintain, express, and extend their power over others. He is adamant that a “theory of the gift” must be “powerless by its very essence.”⁶⁸ But such a statement evokes yet another paradox: that gifts must be given by a party empowered enough to give a gift but without acting upon or generating any new anatomies of power. Forgiveness, as a type of gift, must come from a place of power, while—at the same time—remaining powerless. Derrida writes: “What I try to think as the ‘purity’ of a forgiveness worthy of its name, would be a forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereignty.”⁶⁹ Such a pernicious, hierarchical relation of power is one that I contend can be mitigated by the state of equality characteristic of public, political interactions occurring between civically equal friends in the “world.”

D. Confronting the Aporias of Forgiveness

Although the intersection of aporias that structure the logic of forgiveness transforms this notion into a “mad” pursuit, a sort of “madness of the impossible,” Derridean deconstruction demands an experience of the aporetic nature of forgiving because it is through the paralysis induced by these paradoxes that one can begin to take responsibility for one’s decisions and actions. In other words, it is in the face of such aporias that deconstruction not only destroys ideas, words, concepts, themes, and so on—intervening in a particular “context”—but also acts as a form of criticism which is animated by an “undeconstructable concern for justice.” By revealing the unsolvable paradoxes of the conditional and unconditional, the forgivability of the unforgivable, and the powerful powerlessness that structure the logic of this notion, Derrida shows how the notion of forgiveness does not pose any “problems.” Rather, this idea is one which is inherently aporetic. Thus, to consider forgiveness, and to practice it, is to express a willingness to “go through pain and aporia,”⁷⁰ which is to experience the sheer “madness” of a moment that is characterized by its “undecidability.” It is consequently necessary to confront fearlessly the experience of (im)possibility that the aporetic logic of this notion begets, doing so in such a manner that we retain a radical openness to the “face” of the (unknown) Other and thus seek to act ever more justly toward the stranger who appears before us.

Despite the fact that Derrida asserts that the paradoxicality of forgiveness cannot be escaped, he nevertheless encourages his readers to confront the aporetic logic of this idea by locating a compromise between the extremes of the aporias inherent to the act of forgiving. To appeal both to the conditional and unconditional strands of forgiveness is a process that Derrida describes as a “negotiation”⁷¹ between two opposing polarities. Although I consider Derrida’s notion of negotiation in terms of Arendt’s Kantian conceptualization of the imagination in chapter 4, it is important to underscore here that a Derridean understanding of negotiating requires us to think in a “to-and-fro” manner, “between two positions, two poles, two choices [. . .] always [going] from one to the other [. . .] [without] establishing oneself anywhere.”⁷² Derrida directly links this back-and-forth, leisure-less mental activity to his notion of responsibility when he states:

We have to negotiate between the unconditional and conditional. They cannot be dissociated, although we know they are absolutely heterogeneous and incommensurable. It is because these incommensurable poles are indissociable that we have to take responsibility, a difficult responsibility, to negotiate the best response in an impossible situation.⁷³

In this sense, experiencing forgiveness is necessarily a negotiation between the pure and impure, between the human and superhuman, and between the possible and the impossible. Because there is no formula that can be used to overcome the aporetic character of the conceptual relationships that structure the logic of forgiveness, Derrida suggests that it is only possible to confront the paradox of forgiveness by appealing simultaneously to both the conditional and the unconditional, privileging—to the greatest extent possible—the hyperbolic ethical demand of that which is infinite and unfathomable.

Departing from this understanding of how to act responsibly in the face of the aporetic, the subsequent chapters of this book present a series of what may be considered conceptual “negotiations,” theorizing both a form of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism that addresses the paradoxical issues inherent to these two ideas. I attempt to confront the aporias that Derrida’s analysis reveals in order to theorize a political forgiveness that overcomes—as far as is theoretically possible—the paradoxes and pitfalls identified by a deconstruction of the faculty of forgiving. To do so, I use Arendt’s work to theorize forgiveness as a form of “caring for the world.” I demonstrate that in caring for worldly, public spaces—which are constituted by the relationships that are formed between actors in the political realm—forgiveness protects freedom and “power.” It is by thinking in terms of an Arendtian notion of power, and the experience of freedom which accompanies it, that we can pass through the aporetic impasse revealed by a Derridean deconstruction. A care-based conceptualization of forgiveness, as a political practice performed in public spaces and during moments which are thoroughly conditioned, is an approach that allows for the experience of a certain miraculousness associated with the seemingly preternatural power of this idea/practice.

3. Derrida: On Cosmopolitanism

In the final section of this chapter, I focus on Derrida’s deconstruction of cosmopolitanism, examining his understanding of cosmopolitanism by investigating three key aspects of his work, all of which frame my theorization of cosmopolitan theory in the latter half of this book. I cast light upon his understanding of (un)conditional hospitality, his argument for “cities of refuge,” and his perspective on mondialisation. Derrida’s deconstruction of cosmopolitanism serves as an ideal departure point from which to begin constructing my own theory of this idea: a “caring cosmopolitanism” inspired by an Arendtian conception of “the political” and a Derridean understanding of radically welcoming the (unknown) Other.

Derrida’s examination of cosmopolitan theory, like his discussion of the notion of forgiveness, uncovers the logical structure of cosmopolitanism that has been fundamentally shaped by Christian doctrine. In particular, he shows that cosmopolitanism is a notion that developed in terms of a Christianization of Stoic philosophy, before evolving as part of Kant’s conception of universal hospitality, which Derrida understood to be at the conceptual core of its contemporary manifestations. To provide an overview of his genealogical movement into the historical “text” that constitutes le héritage, Derrida writes:

We could identify the cosmopolitan (cosmopolitique) tradition common to a certain Greek stoicism and a Pauline Christianity, of which the inheritors were the figures of the Enlightenment, and to which Kant will doubtlessly have given the most rigorous philosophical formulation in his famous Definitive Article in View of Perpetual Peace: “The law of cosmopolitanism must be restricted to the conditions of universal hospitality.”⁷⁴

Kant’s account of hospitality holds special significance in the history of political thought, though it was the Apostle Paul, whose “language continues to structure and condition the modern concepts of the rights of man or crimes against humanity,”⁷⁵ and who transmuted a certain Ciceronian conception of cosmopolitanism.⁷⁶ Derrida aims to disentangle this notion from its religious roots in order to construct a secular, humanist form of cosmopolitan theory. According to Hent de Vries, Derrida “turns to religion” as a means of “trivializ[ing]” the role of the religious by “stripping” religion of its “ontological and axiological privilege.”⁷⁷ In line with Heidegger’s approach to Destruktion, which calls for a “shaking off the ontological tradition” and “staking out the positive possibilities of that tradition,” Derrida focuses upon the Christian character of cosmopolitanism because he seeks to emancipate cosmopolitan theory from the very tradition that propelled it through history. As with his conceptualization of forgiveness, the hyperbolic character of cosmopolitan hospitality formed from Christian teachings privileges the unconditional over the conditional: this is a relationship I seek to re-balance and re-world with the help of Arendt’s body of thought.