Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World

Hent de Vries, Nils Schott

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231540124
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Ethik & Moralphilosophie

One can love and not forgive or out of love decide not to forgive. Or one can forgive but not love, or choose to forgive but not love the ones forgiven. Love and forgiveness follow parallel and largely independent paths, a truth we fail to acknowledge when we pressure others to both love and forgive. Individuals in conflict, sparring social and ethnic groups, warring religious communities, and insecure nations often do not need to pursue love and forgiveness to achieve peace of mind and heart. They need to remain attentive to the needs of others, an alertness that prompts either love or forgiveness to respond.

By reorienting our perception of these enduring phenomena, the contributors to this volume inspire new applications for love and forgiveness in an increasingly globalized and no longer quite secular world. With contributions by the renowned French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, the poet Haleh Liza Gafori, and scholars of religion (Leora Batnitzky, Nils F. Schott, Hent de Vries), psychoanalysis (Albert Mason, Orna Ophir), Islamic and political philosophy (Sari Nusseibeh), and the Bible and literature (Regina Schwartz), this anthology reconstructs the historical and conceptual lineage of love and forgiveness and their fraught relationship over time. By examining how we have used—and misused—these concepts, the authors advance a better understanding of their ability to unite different individuals and emerging groups around a shared engagement for freedom and equality, peace and solidarity.

1

ORANGE ALERT

Haleh Liza Gafori

We’re on orange alert again I hear

as we cross the East River

and the winter sun beams its blinding white light

across the jagged surface of the water.

Orange alert?

So am I to be on the lookout now

for a suitcase that ticks, for a turbaned man,

a veiled woman, a shoulder belt of rockets?

Shall I suspect all Mohammeds today?

Or shall I envision my escape through the office hall, the bathroom window,

through the shaken streets as ash rains down

and my morning coffee gets cold?

I am so tired of terror!

Orange alert, really?

How about a russet alert?

A coral alert, a sienna alert,

a burnt ochre, vermilion alert,

a salmon, pumpkin, persimmon alert,

a rust carrot apricot alert, a saffron alert!

Give me a saffron alert!

Take me to the rugged mountains of Iran and let’s get down on our knees and pluck the saffron threads from purple crocuses that paint a belt out to the blue sea!

Let’s stand over a burlap sack stuffed with it and inhale its aroma of honey, hay, and steel

Saffron alert!

Give me one glimpse of the powdery grains the color of flames, of my great grandmother’s mortar and pestle they stained a luminous yellow,

of Cleopatra’s tinted bathwater,

or the saffron robes of Buddhist monks meditating as the first sliver of sun appears on the horizon

Saffron, the color of illumination!

Give me a saffron alert!

Or give me an orange alert, but make it a citrus alert!

Naval, Valencia, Satsuma, Blood—

glowing spheres of trapped sunlight I hold in my palm,

their yielding skin and the fragrant spray of summer wakes me through the winter.

Desert lime, clementines, tangerine, citron,

tangelo, pomelo, bergamot, mandarin—

the juice is dripping down my fingers!

This is a citrus alert!

And if tomorrow is a red alert,

then make it a ruby alert, a pomegranate alert, a full-bodied Bordeaux alert, a blood alert!

Our blood, this magical medium pumping through us,

brimming with iron atoms that were once inside the core stars—

iron atoms that were once shooting across the cosmos, now inside our blood, delivering oxygen to our muscles, minds, and hearts even while we’re sleeping!

Alert me to the magic of our blood!

This is a red alert!

But red alert is maximum terror alert they say again and again

So what am I to do now?

Shall I avoid all close quarters, elevators, buses, and subways?

Shall I walk over two bridges to get to work?

Or shall I stay at home, lock the door, sit on the sofa and consider the tears of a child six thousand miles away, just orphaned

Streaks of red dripping down an Afghani man’s arm,

Streaks of red dripping down an American soldier’s arm,

Children sleepwalking in bodies rigid with trauma

This is a red alert!

For who experiencing such agony wouldn’t consider revenge?

Red alert, orange alert, human alert

Under that veil, a woman

Under that turban, that cap, that beard

Under that skin the color of pyramids, the color of sand dunes, the color of lions is a soul

And under that ink-blue business suit walking up the bone-white stairs of the Capitol is a soul

And under that U.S. army camouflage the color of my skin is a soul!

Alert me, alert us to this possibility

as we cross the sacred, wretched, swirling river

2

WHAT LOVE KNOWS

Jean-Luc Marion

I HAVE BEEN ASKED to say some few words about the concept of love and how it can lead to a concept of forgiveness. I shall try to do that by addressing the following points:

• love and the question of space

• love and the question of time

• love and the question of self and

• the question of reciprocity,

in order to then make some final points about forgiveness.

I

I think the great obstacle to any approach to the question of love lies in the common assumption that we understand very well what it means to love and to be loved. We assume this because we rely on the modern understanding of love, which is the experience of love as a passion. From the point of view of the history of Western philosophy, from the point of view of human subjectivity from, let’s say, Descartes to the twentieth century, we love the way we suffer from a disease. The literary presentation of love was exactly that of a disease. When you read Proust or Stendhal, among the French authors, for example, you see that to be in a situation of loving means that free will is suspended, that you go through the stages of “I love you” and a crisis, which lead you to a conclusion that—whether positive or negative, that makes no real difference—was not decided by you. The idea is that love is an excruciating joy or an exciting pain, but it is not, in any case, decided by us—like a disease. This idea prevents us from understanding that love is a question of knowledge. The situation of love means that by loving we shall understand things around us in a different way and understand new information or understand new connections in this information than we would do otherwise. Love is not a passion; it is a point of view.

I think that there is a kind of erotic reduction. Reduction, in phenomenology, is the operation by which you put into brackets some assumption usually made about the state of the world around us and focus on what is really given. Let’s say we think of the noise made by the water in a fountain. In the natural attitude, from the point of view of classical empiricism, when asked, what do you hear, they would say, I hear sound of a certain frequency, on a certain place on the decibel scale, etc. In fact, that is not true, that is an abstraction. What we hear is a fountain. In most cases, what we perceive is not a sound; it is the thing itself. When we are in the street, we do not perceive sounds, we not only perceive the sound of this or that machine, but we hear a car, say, and can even identify a particular model of car. So we very often have to make a reduction to really understand what is experienced. And that is also the case when we are in love, when we are talking about the erotic phenomenon. It is another way of experiencing the world. Let’s take three dimensions of the erotic reduction.

II

The first is about the experience of space. In the...