Banki - The forgiveness to come: the Holocaust and the hyper-ethical

just ideas

transformative ideals of justice in ethical and political thought

series editors

Drucilla Cornell

Roger Berkowitz

Peter Banki

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK 2018

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ISBN 978-0-8232-7866-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available at http://catalog.loc.gov.

First edition

This book addresses the difficulties posed by the Holocaust for a thinking of forgiveness inherited from the Abrahamic (i.e., monotheistic) tradition. As a way to approach these difficulties, it explores the often radically divergent positions in the debate on forgiveness in the literature of Holocaust survivors. Forgiveness is sometimes understood as a means of self-empowerment (Eva Mozes Kor); part of the inevitable process of historical normalization and amnesia (Jean Amry); or otherwise as an unresolved question that will survive all trials and remain contemporary when the crimes of the Nazis belong to the distant past (Simon Wiesenthal).

Why does the value of forgiveness impose itself in the literature of the Holocaust? What does this imposition reveal about Western culture, dominated by Judeo-Christian traditions? Scholars in both German and Jewish studies have argued for the necessity, in the light of the Holocaust, to rethink what forgiveness is, the conditions under which it supposedly takes place, and in particular its relation to justice. What the philosopher Vladimir Janklvitch has termed the inexpiable character of Nazi crimes need not necessarily imply what he called the death of forgiveness. However, the inexpiable, the idea of a crime or wrongdoing which cannot be atoned for or expiated, compels us to rethink the habitual understanding of forgiveness as a human possibility or power, moreover, one that, as Hannah Arendt believed, must be the correlate of punishment.

Accompanied by an extended examination of Jacques Derridas thought of forgiveness (as forgiveness of the unforgivable) and its elaboration in relation to the juridical concept of crimes against humanity, I undertake close readings of Simon Wiesenthals The Sunflower (1969), Jean Amrys At the Minds Limits (Jenseits von Schuld und Shne) (1966), Vladimir Janklvitchs Forgiveness (1967), and Robert Antelmes The Human Race (1947). In addition, I analyze the documentary film Forgiving Doctor Mengele (2006) on Eva Mozes Kor. Each of these works bears witness to aporias, or unsolvable impasses, of forgiveness, justice, and responsibility in relation to the Holocaust. All of the texts chosen, and especially those written in the late 1960s, are at grips with the idea that the crimes committed by the Nazis are inexpiable. To this extent, they contend in different ways with the limits of a dominant understanding of forgiveness within the Abrahamic tradition.

While a great deal of secondary literature exists on the work of Jean Amry, Robert Antelme, and Simon Wiesenthal, in general this literature relies on an understanding of forgiveness grounded in the metaphysical presuppositions that Derridas thought puts into question (i.e., the autonomous subject, the performative utterance, and the belief in an end or telos without remainder). Even when the value of forgiveness is declared to be dead (Janklvitch) or superseded by the crimes of the Nazis (Amry), it is always the same metaphysical or ontotheological understanding of forgiveness that is presumed.

While I believe it is necessary and justified to assert that forgiveness of the Holocaust is impossible, today this response is, I argue, insufficient. In an epoch of worldwidization (mondialisation), it may not be possible simply to escape what could be termed the violence of forgiveness.

One must ask what are the limits of an understanding of forgiveness that is conditioned on the perpetrators consciousness of their crimes and their determination to condemn and expiate them. In such an understanding the perpetrator as such is not forgiven, nor is the crime itself, but only the perpetrator who has later agreed to reform themselves; the one who in Levis terms ceases to be an enemy. One could go so far as to ask if in this understanding there is really any forgiveness at all. In the name of a more marginal strand of thinking within the Abrahamic tradition, one that emphasizes unconditional forgiveness, Jacques Derrida argues that a forgiveness worthy of the name must not require that the perpetrator be in conscious agreement with their victim about the nature of their crimes and that they reform themselves in conformity with this agreement. Rather, it should be extended to the perpetrator as such, that is, as unreformed and unrepentant, as they were at the moment when they committed their crimes. Such forgiveness would imply therefore that the perpetrator could commit the same crime again and again, even against the same victims without ever making a promise to reform themselves: You kill me, I forgive you, you kill me again, I forgive you, and so on ad infinitum.

At first sight it may be difficult, even impossible, to understand the necessity of such a thought, which would seem to be in greatest proximity to the very worst, to the idea that through forgiveness the Holocaust could be permitted to happen again and again, as it were, in a sort of Nietzschean eternal return. And indeed, when I first heard Derrida speak of pure forgiveness, it was this very implication, which he did not seek to hide, that I found to be most impermissible and even angering, for it challenged one of my most deeply held political beliefs. And yet, if such a thought has any justification, it lies perhaps in the insufficiency of a certain worldwidized language and scenography of apology and forgiveness in the context of what are called crimes against humanity. The unconditional forgiveness of which Derrida speaks is not the accomplishable act of a subject who could ever say with good conscience I forgive or I can forgive. If in an epoch of worldwidization it is not possible simply to escape the violence of forgiveness, then it is necessary to rethink what forgiveness is, the conditions under which it supposedly takes place, and especially its relation to justice. The implementation in international law of a concept of crimes against humanity calls foreven necessitatesthe thought of a forgiveness, which does not imply closure of the infinite wounds of the past. Such forgiveness would be distinguished from personal and political reconciliation. What are the conditions under which this forgiveness may be thought or dreamed? How can it be dreamed without renouncing political vigilance? Must this political vigilance itself today be rethought?