Questioning God

John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, Michael J. Scanlon, John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, Michael J. Scanlon

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780253108678
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Jacques Derrida and other scholars explore postmodern thinking about God and consider the nature of forgiveness in relation to the paradoxes of the gift. In fifteen insightful essays, Jacques Derrida and an international group of scholars explore the implications of deconstruction for religion, focusing on two topics: God and forgiveness. Among the themes addressed by contributors are the possibilities of imagining God as unthinkable, imagining God as nonpatriarchal, imagining a return to Augustine, and imagining an age in which praise is far more important than narrative. Questioning God moves readers beyond the parameters of metaphysical reason and modernist rationality as it attempts to think the questions of God and forgiveness in a postmodernist context. Contributors include John D.Caputo, Jacques Derrida, Mark Dooley, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Robert Gibbs, Jean Greisch, Kevin Hart, Richard Kearney, Cleo McNelly Kearns, John Milbank, Regina M.Schwartz, Michael J.Scanlon, and Graham Ward. "What sets this work apart from the majority of other publications on the subject of postmodern theology and prevents it from descending into a sanctimonious hagiography of Derrida's genius is the presence among the contributors of Graham Ward and John Milbank, two of the founding members of the movement known as radical orthodoxy. This present work is the first to document supporters of radical orthodoxy critically engaging with proponents of Derridean deconstruction." — Perspectives

PART I. FORGIVING

one

To Forgive

The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible

Jacques Derrida

Pardon, yes, pardon.

I have just said “pardon,” in English.

You don’t understand anything by this for the moment, no doubt. “Pardon.”

It is a word, “pardon”; this word is a noun: one says “un pardon,” “le pardon.” In the French language it is a noun. One finds its homonymic equivalent, more or less in the same state, with more or less the same meaning and with uses that are at least analogous in other languages; in English, for example (“pardon,” in certain contexts that will be become clearer later on), although the word is, if not Latin, at least, in its tortuous filiation, of Latin origin (perdon in Spanish, perdâo in Portuguese, perdono in Italian). In the Latin origin of this word, and in too complex a way for us to tackle it head-on today, one finds a reference to the “don,” [the “gift”], to “donation,” [to “gift-giving”]. And more than once we would have to carry over the problems and aporias of the “gift” (such as I have tried to formalize them, for example, in Given Time and in particular in the last chapter of this book, entitled “The Excuse and Pardon”),¹ to transfer them, so to speak, to the problems and non-problems that are the aporias of forgiveness, aporias that are analogous and, what is more, linked. But one must neither yield to these analogies between the gift and forgiveness nor, of course, neglect their necessity; rather, one must attempt to articulate the two, to follow them to the point where, suddenly, they cease to be pertinent. Between giving and forgiving there is at least this affinity or this alliance that, beside their unconditionality of principle—one and the other, giving and forgiving, giving for giving [don par don]—have an essential relation to time, to the movement of temporalization; even though what seems to bind forgiveness to a past, which in a certain way does not pass, makes forgiveness an experience irreducible to that of the gift, to a gift one grants more commonly in the present, in the presentation or presence of the present.

I have just said “experience” of forgiveness or the gift, but the word “experience” may already seem abusive or precipitous here, where forgiveness and gift have perhaps this in common, that they never present themselves as such to what is commonly called an experience, a presentation to consciousness or to existence, precisely because of the aporias that we must take into account; and for example—to limit myself to this for the time being—the aporia that renders me incapable of giving enough, or of being hospitable enough, of being present enough to the present that I give, and to the welcome that I offer, such that I think, I am even certain of this, I always have to be forgiven, to ask forgiveness for not giving, for never giving enough, for never offering or welcoming enough. One is always guilty, one must always be forgiven the gift. And the aporia becomes more extreme when one becomes conscious of the fact that if one must ask forgiveness for not giving, for never giving enough, one may also feel guilty and thus have to ask forgiveness on the contrary, for giving, forgiveness for what one gives, which can become a poison, a weapon, an affirmation of sovereignty, or even omnipotence or an appeal for recognition. One always takes by giving: I have, in the past, insisted at length on this logic of giving-taking. One must a priori, thus, ask forgiveness for the gift itself, one has to be forgiven the gift, the sovereignty or the desire for sovereignty of the gift. And, pushing it farther, irresistibly, to the second degree, one would even have to be forgiven forgiveness, which may itself also include [comporter] the irreducible equivocation of an affirmation of sovereignty, indeed of mastery.

These are the abysses that await us and that will always lie in wait for us—not as accidents to avoid but as the ground [ fond] itself, the ground without ground or groundless ground [ fond sans fond] of the thing itself called gift or forgiveness. Thus, no gift without forgiveness and no forgiveness without gift; but the two are, above all, not the same thing. The verbal link of don to pardon, which is marked in Latin languages but not in Greek, for example, as far as I know (and we will have to ask ourselves about the apparent presence or absence of forgiveness in the strict sense in ancient Greek culture; an enormous and delicate question), this verbal link of don and pardon is also present in English and German: in English, to forgive, forgiveness, asking for forgiveness, and one will oppose to give and to get (this extraordinary word in the English language to which one would have to devote years of seminar) in to forgive versus to forget, forgiving is not forgetting (another enormous problem); in German, although Verzeihen is more common—Verzeihung, jenen um Verzeihung bitten: to ask someone for forgiveness—and this is the word Hegel uses in the Phenomenology of Spirit (we should return to this), one often uses Entschuldigung (more in the sense of an excuse) and entschuldbar in the equivocal sense of the forgivable-excusable, literally deculpabilizable, relieved of, exonerated from a debt remitted. There is nonetheless a word in German, a lexical family that maintains this link between the gift and forgiveness; vergeben means “to forgive,” “ich bitte um Vergebung” [I ask for forgiveness], but its usage is usually reserved for solemn occasions, especially spiritual or religious occasions, occasions less common than those that elicit Verzeihen or Entschuldigen. This link between the uses of the word “pardon,” those uses said to be common and everyday and light (for example when I say “pardon,” “sorry” at the moment I must pass in front of someone as I get out of an elevator) and the serious uses, reflective, intense uses, this link between all types of uses in very different situations, this link should be one of our problems, both a semantic problem of the concept of forgiveness and a pragmatic problem of the acts of language or pre- or ultra-linguistic practice. Vergebung is used more frequently—but this frequency and this probability are precisely a question of practice, of context and social gesture—more foreseeably; thus, a religious sense (Biblical-Koranic here) of the remission of sins, although the use of the lexical family (Vergeben, Vergebung, Vergabe) is both flexible and perverse: Vergeben can mean the misdeal [maldonne], the corruption of the gift, sich etwas vergeben: to compromise oneself; and Vergabe is an invitation to tender [marché attribué], an auctioning …)

“Pardon”: “pardon” is a noun. It can sometimes be preceded (in French) by a definite or indefinite article (le pardon, un pardon) and inscribed, for example as subject, in a constative sentence: forgiveness [ le pardon] is this or that, forgiveness [le pardon] has been asked by someone or by an institution, a pardon [un pardon] has been granted or refused, and so forth…. Forgiveness asked by the Episcopate, by the police, by doctors, forgiveness that the university or the Vatican has not yet asked for, and so forth. This is the noun as reference of the constative—or theoretical—type. One could devote a lecture to the question, the subject, the theme of forgiveness, and this is basically what we are preparing to do (forgiveness thus becomes, to this extent, the name of a theme or of a theoretical problem, to be treated in a horizon of knowledge), unless the actors of the lecture ask or grant forgiveness in theoretically treating forgiveness. And when I opened this lecture by saying “pardon,” you did not know, you still do not know, what I was doing, if I was begging your pardon or if, instead of using it, I was mentioning the noun “pardon” as the title of the lecture. For in the single word “pardon,” with or without an exclamation point, one can, although nothing forces one to do so if a context does not require it, already hear an entire sentence implicit in it, a performative sentence: Pardon! I am begging your pardon, I am begging you [vous] to pardon me, I am begging you [te] to pardon me, pardon me, I beg you [pardonnez-moi, je vous prie], pardon me, I am begging you [pardonne-moi, je t’en prie].

(I am already marking, I have just marked it as if in passing, beginning with a long digression in parentheses, this distinction between the tu and the vous in order to situate or announce a question that will long remain suspended but on which no doubt everything will also hang; if the “you” is not a “vous” of respect or distance, as this “Vous” that Lévinas says is preferable to Buber’s “Tu,” which signifies too much proximity or familiarity, or even fusion, and risks canceling out the infinite transcendence of the other; if thus the “you” of “I beg your pardon,” “pardon me” is a collective and plural “you,” the question then becomes one of a collective pardon—collective either because it involves a group of subjects, others, citizens, individuals, and so forth, or because it already involves, and this is even more complicated, but this complication is at the heart of “pardon,” a multiplicity of agencies [ instances] or moments, instances [instances] or instants, of “I”s inside the “I.” Who forgives or who asks whom for forgiveness, at what moment? Who has the right or the power to do this, “who [to] whom?” And what does the “who” signify here? This will always be the almost ultimate form of the question, most often of the question insoluble by definition. However formidable it may be, this question is perhaps not the ultimate question. More than once we will be faced with the effects of a preliminary question, prior to this one, which is the question “who” or “what”? Does one forgive someone for a wrong committed, for example a perjury (but, as I would argue, a fault, an offense, a harm, a wrong committed is in a certain sense always a perjury), or does one forgive someone something, someone who, in whatever way, can never totally be confused with the wrongdoing and the moment of the past wrongdoing, nor with the past in general. This question—“who” or “what”—will not cease, in its many forms, to return and to haunt, to obsess the language of forgiveness and this not only by multiplying aporetic difficulties but also by forcing us finally to suspect or suspend the meaning of this opposition between “who” and “what,” a little as if the experience of forgiveness (of a forgiveness asked for, hoped for, whether granted or not), as if, perhaps, the impossibility of a true, appropriate, appropriable experience of “forgiveness” signified the dismissal of this opposition between “who” and “what,” its dismissal and thus its history, its passed historicity.

But between the “pardon” of the “pardon me” [“pardonne-moi”] and the “pardon” of the “pardon me” [“pardonnez-moi”] or the “pardon us” [“pardonnez-nous”] or the “pardon us” [“pardonne-nous”] (four essentially different possibilities, four different hands [donnes] of forgiveness between the singular and the plural that must be multiplied by all the alternatives of “who” and “what”—this makes a lot), the form that is the most massive, the most easily identifiable today of this formidable question, and we will begin with it, would be the one of a singular plural: can one, does one, have the right, is it in accordance with the meaning of “forgiveness” to ask more than one, to ask a group, a collectivity, a community for forgiveness? Is it possible to ask or to grant forgiveness to someone other than the singular other, for a harm or a singular crime? This is one of the first aporias in which we will constantly be entangled.

In a certain way, it seems to us that forgiveness can only be asked or granted “one to one,” face to face, so to speak, between the one who has committed the irreparable or irreversible wrong and he or she who has suffered it and who is alone in being able to hear the request for forgiveness, to grant or refuse it. This solitude of two, in the scene of forgiveness, would seem to deprive any forgiveness of sense or authenticity that was asked for collectively, in the name of a community, a Church, an institution, a profession, a group of anonymous victims, sometimes dead, or their representatives, descendants, or survivors. In the same way, this singular, even quasi-secret solitude of forgiveness would turn forgiveness into an experience outside or heterogeneous [étrangère] to the rule of law, of punishment or penalty, of the public institution, of judiciary calculations, and so forth. As Vladimir Jankélévitch pointedly reminds us in Le pardon,² forgiveness of a sin defies penal logic. Where forgiveness exceeds penal logic, it lies outside, it is foreign to [étranger] any juridical space, even the juridical space in which the concept of a crime against humanity after the war, and, in 1964, in France, the law of the imprescriptibility of crimes against humanity appeared. The imprescriptible—namely, what is beyond any “statute of limitations”—is not the un-forgivable, and I am indicating here very quickly, too quickly, a critical and problematic space toward which we would have to return again and again. All of the public declarations of repentance that are multiplying in France today (Eglise de France, the police and the medical profession—still not the Vatican as such, nor the university in spite of its accomplishments [records] in the area in question), declarations that were preceded, at a certain rate and in various forms in other countries, through similar gestures—the Japanese prime minister or V. Havel presenting excuses to certain victims of the past, the episcopacy in Poland and Germany proceeding to an examination of conscience at the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz; the attempt at reconciliation in South Africa, and so forth. All of these public manifestations of repentance (whether state sponsored or not), and most often of “forgiveness asked,” very new manifestations in the history of politics, are determined by the background of the historical-juridical resources [s’enlèvent sur ce fonds historico-juridique] that carried the institution, the invention, the foundation of the juridical concept of Nuremberg in 1945, a concept still unknown then, of “crime against humanity.” Be this as it may, the concept of forgiveness—or the unforgivable—which is often put forward in all of these discourses, and in their commentary, remains heterogeneous to the judiciary or penal dimension that determines both the time of prescription or the imprescriptibility of the crimes. That is, unless the non-juridical dimension of forgiveness, and of the unforgivable—there where it suspends and interrupts the usual order of law—has not in fact come to inscribe itself, inscribe its interruption in the law itself. This is one of the difficulties that awaits us.

The little book of Jankélévitch that follows Le pardon and is entitled L’imprescriptible bears in epigraph several lines of Eluard, whose interest is paradoxical, and to my eyes usefully provocative, insofar as the lines oppose salvation, but salvation on earth, to forgiveness. Eluard says:

There is no salvation on earth

for as long as executioners can be forgiven.

Il n’y a pas de salut sur la terre

tant qu’on peut pardonner aux bourreaux.

Insofar as it almost always happens, and in a non-fortuitous way, that one associates—we will often return to this—expiation, salvation, redemption, and reconciliation with forgiveness, these remarks have at least the merit of breaking with common sense, which is also that of the greatest religious and spiritual traditions of forgiveness—the Judaic or Christian traditions, for example, that never remove forgiveness from a horizon of reconciliation, hope for redemption and salvation, through confession, remorse or regret, sacrifice, and expiation. In L’imprescriptible, from the very foreword of the text entitled “Should We Pardon Them?,” a foreword that dates from 1971, Jankélévitch yields, without saying it in these terms, to a kind of repentance, since he admits that this text seems to contradict what he had written four years earlier in the book Le pardon of 1967. In addition, the short polemical essay “Should We Pardon Them?” was written in the context of the French debates of 1964 about the imprescriptibility of Hitler’s crimes and the crimes against humanity. As Jankélévitch makes clear: “In Le pardon, a purely philosophical work that I have published elsewhere, the answer to the question Must we pardon? seems to contradict the one given here. Between the absolute of the law of love and the absolute of wicked (méchante) freedom there is a tear that cannot be entirely unsewn [décou...