“Forgiveness-if it has a sense, and if it exists-constitutes the horizon common to memory, history, and forgetting. Always in retreat, this horizon slips away from any grasp. It makes forgiving difficult: not easy but not impossible. It places a seal of incompleteness on the entire enterprise. If forgiveness is difficult to give and to receive, it is just as difficult to conceive of. The trajectory of forgiveness has its origin in the disproportion that exists between the poles of fault and forgiveness…. This polarity is constitutive of the equation of forgiveness: below, the avowal of fault; above, the hymn to forgiveness. Two speech acts are at work here; the first one brings to language an experience of the same order as solitude, failure, struggle, those ‘givens of experience’ (Jean Nabert)-those ‘boundary situations’ (Karl Jaspers)-upon which reflective thinking is grafted. In this way, the place of moral accusation is bared-imputability, that place where agents bind themselves to their action and recognize themselves as accountable. The second can be heard in the great sapiential poetry that in the same breath celebrates love and joy. There is forgiveness, this voice says. The tension between the avowal and the hymn will be carried almost to a breaking point, the impossibility of forgiveness replying to the unpardonable nature of moral evil. In this way the forgiveness equation will be formulated.

Begun in this way, the trajectory of forgiveness will then take the form of an odyssey destined to lead forgiveness step-by-step back from the regions furthest removed from selfhood (the juridical, the political, social morality) to the place of its presumed impossibility, namely, imputability. This odyssey crosses through a series of institutions established for the purpose of public accusation. These institutions themselves appear to exist in several layers depending on the degree of internalization of guilt indicated by the social rule: it is on the judicial level that the formidable question of the imprescriptibility of crimes is raised, which can be considered to be the first major test of the practical problematic of forgiveness. This course will be pursued from the plane of criminal guilt to that of political and moral guilt inherent in the status of shared citizenship. The question then raised concerns the place of forgiveness at the margins of the institutions responsible for punishment. If it is true that justice must be done, under the threat of sanctioning the impunity of the guilty, forgiveness can find refuge only in gestures incapable of being transformed into institutions. These gestures, which would constitute the incognito of forgiveness, designate the ineluctable space of consideration due to every human being, in particular to the guilty.

In the second stage of our odyssey, we take note of a remarkable relation which, for a time, places the request for forgiveness and the offering of forgiveness on a plane of equality and reciprocity, as if there existed a genuine relation of exchange between these two speech acts. Our exploration of this track is encouraged by the kinship found in numerous languages between forgiving and giving. In this regard, the correlation between the gift and the counter-give (the gift in return) in certain archaic forms of exchange tends to reinforce the hypothesis that the request for and the offer of forgiveness are held to balance one another in a horizontal relation. It seemed to me that, before correcting it, this suggestion deserved to be pushed to its limit, to the point where even the love of one’s enemies can appear as a mode of reestablishing the exchange on a nonmarket level. The problem then is to recover, at the heart of the horizontal relation of exchange, the vertical asymmetry inherent in the initial equation of forgiveness.

The realization of this unequal exchange must then be carried back to the heart of selfhood. A final effort of clarification resting once again on a horizontal correlation will therefore be proposed with the pair, forgiveness and promise. In order to be bound by a promise, the subject of an action must also be able to be released from it through forgiveness. The temporal structure of action, namely, the irreversibility and unpredictability of time, calls for the response of a twofold mastery exerted over the carrying out of any action. My thesis here is that a significant asymmetry exists between being able to forgive and being able to promise, as is attested by the impossibility of genuine political institutions of forgiveness. Thus, at the heart of selfhood and at the core of imputability, the paradox of forgiveness is laid bare, sharpened by the dialectic of repentance in the great Abrahamic tradition. What is at issue here is nothing less than the power of the spirit of forgiveness to unbind the agent from his act” (Ricoeur 2006:457-459).

Ricoeur, Paul
2006[2004] Memory, History, Forgetting. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, trans. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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