Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 16:59:41 +0000 From: Ruth Chandler <R.Chandler-AT-ucc.ac.uk> Subject: Re: RE: RE: way to go! hi diane, thanks for taking the time to detail this- actually the distinction between the conditionsed and unconditioned is where i have problems with D- it seems to me a not too deeply disguised idealism-one can't have the pure but the thought of it remains operative to distinguish between the conditioned and limited-quasi-transcendental in D's terms-D might repudiate a language of mourning but it is not clear that there isn't an element of mourning in the way the distinction is drawn? Ruth.C >>> Diane Davis <d-davis-AT-uiowa.edu> 10/29 5:49 pm >>> 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 --- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- --- from list nietzsche-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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