From: "Diane Davis" <d-davis-AT-uiowa.edu>
Subject: RE: RE: way to go!
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 11:49:11 -0600


Ruth and Warren: 
The forgiveness lectures weren't based in Nietzsche, at least not
explicitly. Sorry if i gave that impression. It just so happened that
while i was in NYC attending one of the lectures (part of a team-taught
seminar Ronell and Derrida do together annually at NYU), Cardozo was
also holding its N and Legal Theory conference, at which Ronell gave the
keynote and Derrida responded. Ronell's working on a book on testing
that involves N's experimental disposition. I've gotten to read a bit of
it in advance, and it's mind-blowing stuff. 

Derrida's response to her presentation at the conference mainly zeroed
in on the notion of the Test itself, but he opened by noting that N's
statement "God is dead" is a specifically x-ian statement, a
performative that kills god upon its utterance and that wouldn't make
sense in Judaism or Islam, frinstance. But the performative, he notes,
produces no pure event b/c it produces it under restrictions. A
"genuine" test, if there is one, he says, would resist any logic of
constative and performative--if it doesn't, it can't really be a test.
It may be that the test of love would qualify as a real test, he says,
since the risk is never neutralized or neutralizable. There is no
insurance. It's absolutely risky--in friendship and in love, you can't
even be sure if it's really you who is loved and who is being called to
love. JD also noted that the "new philosophers" are the ones who can
think the Nietzschean "perhaps." 

Lessee...and the forgiveness lectures. He gave three of them, Warren,
and i only caught the last one. But yes, JD's work on forgiveness is
available both online and in a new little book called _On
Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness._   Online, the interview (or most of
it) is called "The Century and Pardon," and it's here:
http://www.excitingland.com/fixion/pardonEng.htm

Basically, JD's trying to distinguish b/w what we call amnesty and
something like "pure" "forgiveness," which he notes is something else
all together. Several tricky issues arise in the distinction--and btw he
reminds us that forgiveness is not the same as the gift but
for-give-ness does house the "concept" of the gift (Le/le don). (If you
know his work on the gift, you'll recognize some of these moves.)
Forgiveness, to really *be* forgiveness, can't be FOR some other
purpose--not even for reconciliation. It cannot even involve a work of
mourning. What we might call "genuine" (kabillion scare quotes)
forgiveness could not be therapeutic in any way. It has to be
aneconomic--a total interruption of exchange and even historic
temporality. And it would have to give itself freely, without
restrictions or recourse to judgment--it is not a cognitive act, in
other words: forgiveness, to be forgiveness, would have to be
unconditional. Forgiveness, he says, must be understood as the
impossible; for it can only be(come) possible as the im-possible. 

So if you ask me for forgiveness for something you did to me and i
decide to forgive you, one question becomes: whom am i to forgive? The
you who did it and may do it again or this other you who asks for
forgiveness and so who is no longer really the guilty party and who
therefore needs no forgiveness? And for that matter, if what you have
done is forgivable in the first place, what's the point? For forgiveness
to be what it is, it must be limitless because only that which is
UNforgivable would even NEED to be forgiven.  And then: who gets to give
forgiveness for an unforgivable act? Can i give it in the name of the
*real* victim (who is presumably no longer around to give it)? Or from
another angle--who has the power to forgive? It would take a sovereign
b/c already to say "I forgive you" puts me in a position of power; i
claim for myself subjective mastery. 

I've got a billion papers to grade, so i'm going to jump ahead and just
say that Derrida distinguished the conditional "forgiveness" involved in
amnesty from an unconditional and limitless forgiveness, and he noted
that these two, the conditional and the unconditional, are completely
irreconcilable but also indissociable. 

Best, ddd







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