Abstract
Arendt’s turn to forgiveness to redeem politics, in The Human Condition, is riveting. In her account of the human activities of labor, work, and action, Arendt argues that work redeems human existence from the futile cycles of labor by fabricating a durable world in terms of which historical consciousness is possible. Public action and speech, in turn, redeem human life from the meaninglessness generated by the instrumentality of work by producing the stories in terms of which we make sense of the world. Yet, even politics—the highest of human activities—requires redemption. Because in politics we always act among a plurality of free agents, we lack control over the consequences of our actions. Thus, political action not only invests the physical world with meaning by producing a web of human relationships; it also renders fragile the intersubjective world it constitutes.
In so far as morality is more than the sum of mores ... it has, at least politically, no more to support itself than the good will to counter the enormous risks of action by readiness to forgive and be forgiven, to make promises and keep them. These moral precepts are the only ones that are not applied to action from the outside, from some supposedly higher faculty or from experiences outside action’s own reach. They arise, on the contrary, directly out of the will to live together with others in the mode of acting and speaking.
Arendt, The Human Condition
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Notes
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 190.
See Andrew Rigby, Justice and Reconciliation: After the Violence (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001).
See Christopher Bennet, “Is amnesty a collective act of forgiveness?” Contemporary Political Theory, 2, no. 1 (2003): 67–76
Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London and New York: Routledge, 2001)
Peter Digeser, Political Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001)
Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Politics and Forgiveness,” in N. Biggar (ed.), Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001)
Trudy Govier, Forgiveness and Revenge (London: Routledge, 2001)
Claire Moon, “Prelapsarian State: Forgiveness and Reconciliation in Transitional Justice,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 3 (2004)
Donald Shriver, An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
and Erenesto Verdeja, “Derrida and the Impossibility of Forgiveness,” Contemporary Political Theory, 3 (2004): 23–47.
See Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (New York and London: Routledge, 2002)
Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratisation in the Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991)
Neil J. Kritz (ed.), Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes. Volume I: General Consideration (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995)
Martha Minnow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998)
and Ruti Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
This has been most prominent in Ethics & International Affairs. See David Crocker “Reckoning with Past Wrongs: A Normative Framework,” Ethics & International Affairs, 13 (1999): 43–64
Susan Dwyer, “Reconciliation for Realists,” Ethics & International Affairs, 13 (1999): 81–98
Lyn Graybill, “South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Ethical and Theological Perspectives,” Ethics & International Affairs, 12 (1998): 43–62
David Little, “A Different Kind of Justice: Dealing with Human Rights Violations in Transitional Societies,” Ethics & International Affairs, 13 (1999): 65–80
Margaret Popkin and Nehal Bhuta, “Latin American Amnesties in Comparative Perspective: Can the Past be Buried?” Ethics & International Affairs, 13 (1999): 99–116
Juan Mendez, “National Reconciliation, Transitional Justice and the International Court of Justice,” Ethics & International Affairs, 15, no. 1 (2001): 25–44
and Brad R. Roth “Peaceful Transition and Retrospective Justice: Some Reservations (A Response to Juan Mendez),” Ethics & International Affairs, 15, no. 1 (2001): 45–50.
Some of the material included in this chapter was previously published in “Political Grounds for Forgiveness,” Contemporary Political Theory, 2 (2003): 77–87.
Jean Hampton, “Forgiveness, Resentment and Hatred,” in J. Murphy and J. Hampton (eds.), Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 38.
Jeffrie Murphy “Forgiveness and Resentment,” in J. Murphy and J. Hampton (eds.), Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 14–34.
Aurel Kolnai, “Forgiveness,” in Aurel Kolnai (ed.), Ethics, Value and Reality (London: The Athlone Press, 1977), 215–216.
David Novitz, “Forgiveness and Self-Respect,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 58, no. 2 (1998): 306–307.
Joanna North, “Wrongdoing and Forgiveness,” Philosophy, 62 (1987): 505.
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1965), 53.
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London: Earthscan Publications, 1990), 78–79.
Graham Little, The Public Emotions: From Mourning to Hope (Sydney: ABC Books, 2001), 142.
Cheshire Calhoun, “Changing One’s Heart,” Ethics, 103 (1992): 96.
Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, trans. H.H. Gerth and W. Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), 116.
Bert van Roermund, “Never Again,” Paper presented at the colloquium on Law, Time and Reconciliation, Centre for Law and Society, University of Edinburgh, May 15–16, 2002.
Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). Derrida departs fundamentally from Arendt in understanding forgiveness as entirely extraneous to politics; see p. 59f. However, while real enough, this departure is based in part on a misunderstanding since Arendt does not equate politics with a juridical order as Derrida implies but similarly seeks to articulate forgiveness in relation to the ideal of non-sovereign freedom.
Jean Hampton, “The Retributive Idea” in Murphy and Hampton (eds.), Forgiveness and Mercy, 129; see also Herbert Morris, On Guilt and Innocence: Essays in Legal Philosophy and Moral Psychology (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1976), 126–127.
For an analysis of Arendt’s (and Jasper’s) work on collective responsibility and its significance for political reconciliation see Andrew Schaap, “Guilty Subjects and Political Responsibility: Jaspers, Arendt and the Resonance of the ‘German question’ in Politics of Reconciliation,” Political Studies, 49, no. 4 (2001): 749–766. For a more recent articulation of an Arendtian account of political responsibility in contrast to that suggested by Giorgio Agamben see my “Assuming Responsibility in the Hope of Reconciliation,” borderlands e journal 3, 1 (2004), http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/issues/vol3no1.html.
See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. and with an interpretive essay by Ronald Beiner (Chicago, IL.: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 22–27.
Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York and London: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1968), 81.
Bert van Roermund, “Rubbing Off and Rubbing On: The Grammar of Reconciliation,” in E. Christodoulidis and S. Veitch (eds.), Lethe’s Law: Justice, Law and Ethics in Reconciliation (Oxford & Portland, OR.: Hart Publishing, 2001), 182–183.
See Graham Little, The Public Emotions (Sydney: ABC Books, 1999), 194–196.
In their introduction to Derrida’s essay, Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney write that Derridean politics involves the “negotiation between the unconditional and the conditional, between the absolute and the relative, between the universal and the particular”; Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, xi. Indeed, Derrida (p. 45, emphasis in original) writes that it is “between these two poles [the conditional and the unconditional], irreconcilable but indissociable, that decisions and responsibilities are to be taken.” Insofar as Derrida does conceive political forgiveness in these terms, he comes close to the Arendtian conception of forgiveness defended here. However, as Ernesto Verdeja points out, Derrida privileges the unconditional and disparages the conditional throughout his essay, in opposing a forgiveness based on pure love to one conceived in relation to the fallen realm of politics; Verdeja, “Derrida and the Impossibility of Forgiveness,” 27–28. Following Arendt, by contrast, the demand to forgive derives from a love that transcends the political realm not from a juridical order on which politics is predicated. Rather, politics and political forgiveness, are undertaken in what Gillian Rose calls the “broken middle” between law and love, without privileging one over the other but constantly negotiating their competing demands according to the circumstances of action; see Zenon Bankowski, “Remorse and Reconciliation,” paper presented at the colloquium on Law, Time and Reconciliation, Centre for Law and Society, University of Edinburgh, May 15–16, 2002.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 5f.
Pablo de Grief, “Trial and Punishment: Pardon and Oblivion,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 22, no. 3 (1996): 105.
Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999).
Cited in Johnny de Lange, “The Historical Context, Legal Origins and Philosophical Foundations of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in C. Villa-Vicencio and W. Verwoerd (eds.), Looking Back Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (London: Zed Books, 2000), 21. The indigenous concept of ubuntu (according to which people should be friendly, hospitable, magnanimous, compassionate, open, and non-envious) was often referred to in South Africa to lend further legitimacy to the Christian ideal of reconciliation.
Christopher Bennett “Is amnesty a collective act of forgiveness?” Contemporary Political Theory, 2, no. 1 (2003): 67–76.
Christopher Bennett “The Varieties of Retributive Experience,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 52, no. 207 (2002): 145–163.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 188.
Jacques Taminaux, “Athens and Rome,” in Dana Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 176.
See L. G. Feldman, “The Principle and Practice of ‘Reconciliation’ in German Foreign Policy: Relations with France, Israel, Poland and the Czech Republic,” International Affairs, 75, no. 2 (1999): 333–356.
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© 2005 Anthony F. Lang, Jr. and John Williams
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Schaap, A. (2005). Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Transitional Justice. In: Lang, A.F., Williams, J. (eds) Hannah Arendt and International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981509_4
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