Derrida on forgiveness

A series of questions raised by Jacques Derrida in his book, Lo spergiuro e il perdono (Jaca Book, a cura di Vittorio Perego) (EN: Perjury and Pardon, 2 vols. Un. of Chicago Press, 2022) (FR: Le parjure e le pardon, 2 vol. Seuil, 2019)

Cosa significa davvero perdonare; se il perdono sia relato e commisurato o meno alla colpa da perdonarsi; se debba essere concesso a certe condizioni oppure sia, di sua natura, incondizionato; se modifichi il passato oppure soltanto il futuro di chi lo chiede come di chi lo "offre"; se sia lecito, e fino a che punto, rifiutare il perdono; e se sia altrettanto lecito proiettare sugli affari umani una logica perdonista in fondo divina, che il mondo occidentale ha ereditato dalla Bibbia e che la saggezza greca ignorava (sebbe in queste pagine Derrida metta in discussione anche tale assunto). (Massimo Giuliani, "Derrida e i monoteismi alle prese col perdono," [review of Derrida's book] Avvenire, venerdì, 15 marzo 2024, Agora p. III)

En (DeepL):

What it really means to forgive; whether or not forgiveness is relative and commensurate with the guilt to be forgiven; whether it must be granted under certain conditions or is, by its very nature, unconditional; whether it changes the past or only the future of those who ask for it as well as those who 'offer it'; whether it is permissible, and to what extent, to refuse forgiveness; and whether it is equally permissible to project onto human affairs a basically divine logic of forgiveness, which the Western world inherited from the Bible and which Greek wisdom ignored (even if Derrida also questions this assumption in these pages).

The author of the review declares that Christianity does not have a monopoly on pardon, and that it is a prejudice that Christianity is a religion of pardon, and Judaism no. 

[My spontaneous reaction: it is certainly much easier to raise the topic of forgiveness in Christianity, seeing that it is so central to the teaching and example of Jesus, than in other religions...]

Remembering, Forgetting, Forgiving

The last chapter of one of Ricoeur's last books seems to have the suggestive title, Remembering, Forgetting, Forgiving.

We human beings - alone of all animals - live in time. Augustine, according to Keith, saw this as part of our fallen nature. I wonder if that is right. I thought being temporal was part of our human nature! It is more like Heidegger to conflate finitude and fallenness. But I like the expression Keith used in reporting Augustine, that our souls are plastic, they stretch backwards into the past and forward into the future.... And it is true: I am not just a creature of the present; I am, in many ways, my past; my past lives on in me, both my personal and 'my' collective past. And I stretch constantly into the future, anticipating, planning, dreading, looking forward to, expecting....

Ricoeur makes the lovely point, however, that it is not enough to remember. Memory can be cruel. We need to learn to forget, and to forgive. And here, said Keith, Christianity seems to be different from other religions who find it difficult to accept the possibility or the goodness or the rightness of learning to forget and to forgive....

"Do not ask me for forgiveness," says the Jewish survivor to the German lawyer, the protagonist of The Reader. And one understands that. One feels the outrage behind the words. And yet... is there a point at which one must let go of the past? Not necessarily for the sake of the other, but for oneself? Why did Jesus feel the need to repeatedly ask us to forgive? Because, as he himself said, we ourselves need to be forgiven and have indeed been forgiven?

And why do I tend to forget how much I have been forgiven? Why do I find it so hard to forgive, understand, make place for, human foibles, folly, cruelty, ingratitude, coarseness, la-parvah???