Goenawan Mohamad

– A talk at University if Brandeis, to a symposium of the Brandeis International Fellowship Program, October 14, 2004.

During this honored opportunity, I will be speaking about ‘forgiveness’ or ‘forgiving’, an issue intimately related to the theme of the symposium today. It is a happy coincidence that as of tomorrow, Muslims all over the world will start their month of fasting, or Ramadhan. Both Ramadhan and its closing are important moments for a Muslim – since, at least in my country, Indonesia, people traditionally regard them as moments of self-purification, to be followed by an act of giving and forgiving.

As the religious law dictates, on the last evening of the fast, all Muslims save the very poor will have to allot at least 2,5 kilograms of staple food for people who are hungry, needy, or ensnared by debt. There is also an additional norm in our local tradition: we are expected to prepare special dishes –plenty of meat, and a wide variety of delicious spices — for relatives, friends, neighbors, and other guests.

In the village I grew up, I remember doors would be open even to total strangers. In the afternoon, a kind of fiesta would be organized, involving an elaborate costumed parade and a boat race. They were never made into a competition; no jury would announce a winner, no prize would be awarded. Needless to say, the whole celebration was very costly, but the people in the village of my childhood, who were not particularly rich, seemed to expect nothing in return.

It was indeed a carefree moment, when most people endeavored to have and to share a good time – something the more puritanical Muslims would normally perceive as self-indulgence. But as in many religious expressions, this celebration has a multiplicity of motives. It is a mixture of rejoice and generosity, a show of superfluity and an act of sharing, an exhibition of wealth as well as a gesture of nonchalance about it.

Even the act of forgiving has its own ambiguity. The morning after the end of the fasting month, we are expected to forgive everyone bar none, without being asked to by those who have wronged us in the past. It is possible that forgiving opens the way to put the wrong-doer on the same level with the innocent; it helps to rebuild broken relationships and prepare social reconstruction by ceasing the infectiousness of violence.

But forgiving is also like giving: a kind of a grant from someone who is more virtuous to someone who is less, someone sinful or badly behaved. Here you see an implicit inequality of status. When you give something to someone, you find yourself in a better position. The receiver, being in a lesser eminence, can only redress this inequality after s/he replies with her/his own gift.

But such a possibility of symmetry is impossible in forgiveness. Needless to say, the perpetrator cannot forgive the victim. It is a relationship that goes only to one direction. Hence the forgiven person is burdened with a further imbalance between the two.

The burden can be repressive, especially when the forgiving is conditional.

For this reason I often wonder whether this seemingly benign and charitable act has ever yielded a transformative outcome.

I am speaking the way Indonesians manage their discords. Let’s remember that this is a country that has a sad history of communal and political violence. Between 1965 and 1966, thousands of people, mostly members and supporters of the then powerful Indonesian Communist Party, were massacred, thrown into jail, or banished to a remote island without trial. The new regime that emerged out of the bloodshed was a military-backed authoritarian administration ruled by Suharto. Under his dictatorial style, remarkable for its deep-seated paranoia and mania for control, the state continued its own purge. Suspected criminals were murdered by ‘mysterious sharp-shooters’ and their bodies were thrown into the rivers. No investigation was ever conducted to find out why. Later, in his autobiography, the President himself admitted that it was he who ordered the killings.

The story did not end with his fall. In the late 1990s, Muslims and Christians killed each other savagely in the eastern part of the archipelago. About 3000 people died. In the same period, brutal clashes took place in Kalimantan between two or three different cultural groups.

With such a history, how can ‘forgiving’ be a transformative act?

To answer the questions, I would like to make use the wisdom of Jacques Derrida, who died three days ago. Perhaps this is one way to commemorate him, at least as someone who, in his late works, gave a lot of thought on the ethical and the political. For this reason I made another effort to reread his slim book, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness.

In the chapter ‘On Forgiveness,’ Derrida argues that forgiveness is rooted in its own impossibility: ‘forgiveness forgives only the unforgivable,’ and ‘forgiveness must announce itself as impossibility itself.’ For a crime that is not radically evil, any attempt to forgive the perpetrator would not constitute true forgiveness. It would simply be an acknowledgement that a criminal act had been committed.

A ‘radically evil’ crime is not always easy to define. Hannah Arendt describes it as something that ‘confronts us with its overpowering reality and breaks down all standards we know.’ This is closer to Derrida’s use of the term. For Derrida, the perpetrator must have committed an act that is unforgivable by its very nature, one that goes beyond the ‘realm of human affairs.’

It seems that Derrida’s insistence on the impossibility that forgiveness demands is based on the premise that crimes against humanity and other similar evils have to deal with a radically different approach than that which is provided by the existing juridical concepts of responsibility and punishment.

When forgiveness can only occur in the realm beyond that of human affairs, it must be extraordinary. It must be outside the world of mundane pardons and reconciliation. ‘In principle, there is no limit to forgiveness, no measure, no moderation…,’ as he puts it.

Such forgiveness may be able to end the cycle of violence and the continuity of revenge. But for Derrida, the end is beside the point. Forgiveness should not be part of an economy of reparation. It should not be constrained by any aim of reconciliation. Each time forgiveness is to serve an end, be it religious and political, then forgiveness is not pure. Forgiveness is not, should not be, normal, normative, normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible.

Along these lines, Derrida argues that forgiveness cannot be based on a condition, or a demand, explicit or implicit, that the perpetrators should first repent and begin the process of moral transformation before being forgiven.

Why? Because the demand will inevitably produce the kind of forgiveness that is problematic. If the person has repented before that act of forgiveness takes place, the act of forgiving actually addresses a subject who is morally different from the guilty person. In other words, conditional forgiveness only forgives someone other than the guilty one.

True forgiveness is different. It makes no demand that the violator undergo some process of repentance before seeking forgiveness, nor does it emphasize the moral transformation — for both the victim and the perpetrator — that follows the act of forgiving.

It rejects any semblance of economic exchange in forgiveness, any logic of transaction that would place a burden on the recipient. For conditional forgiveness undermines the act of forgiving through the imposition of an existential burden on the forgiven perpetrator.
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Obviously, there is an utmost generosity in Derrida’s idea of pure forgiveness even if it is not without problem. For one, as I see it, it does not really address the issue of guilt.

Without taking the issue of guilt into consideration, how could one expect the perpetrator to recognize his actions as injurious and evil? Thus, he may continue to find them justified. If he has not repudiated them, the perpetrator may very well remain ethically close to his actions. So there is no guarantee that the actor will distance himself from his acts. Therefore, any suggestion that he requires transformation, much less forgiveness, will be perceived as an attack. He perceives forgiveness as a ploy to disrupt the status relation between him and the victim.

But how can one conceptualize guilt? How to name guilt as guilt? Are there any universal or objective criteria to qualify what is guilty and what is not guilty?

Today it is common to recognize the need for a third party, an independent one – let’s say the judicial institution. The problem is that this kind of mediation takes place through language, with its attendant sovereignty.

As Derrida would have it, language always carries a risk. There is always a residue of riddles in the way we communicate. There is always an echo of something dark in our words, especially in a time when trauma, paranoia, and fear pervade our life.

What applies to language applies also to other sovereign institutions: the state, and the judiciary, the committee of truth and reconciliation, and so forth.

In fact it is this inherent risk of mediation that seems to have prompted Derrida to speak about the need to acknowledge the secrets of a victim’s experience: that secret zone unreachable by law or politics, not only because the brutality was so powerful but also because the issue of forgiving versus not forgiving can never be fully transparent.

Hannah Arendt once said that punishment “has something in common with forgiveness, as it tends to put a limit on something that without intervention could continue indefinitely.” In other words, the act of forgiving is a pragmatic decision: we only forgive when we can judge and punish at the same time.

That said, Derrida sees how forgiveness based on pragmatism presupposes the presence of institution, power and sovereignty. Can such institutions do away with the secrets lodged inside a victim’s innermost experience?

In my view, this calls for an ethics of finitude. We are confronted with our own limitations – also when we are ourselves the victim. The victim, to be sure, can serve both as a witness and a judge. But this special status is only but a moment, not the totality. S/he can probably judge but cannot claim “I am the victim.” in much the same way a king cannot beat his own chest and proclaim “I am the state.” S/he cannot claim that his or her suffering and injury are the worst, that they constitute the apex of a self-made hierarchy of victims. Hierarchy is measurement, and measurement is both uniformity and sovereignty.

In other words, just as the trauma of the Holocaust is truly unmatchable so are the trauma of the Tutsi, the Sioux and the African Americans who all suffered on the account of the color of their skin. In their own private pain, they are parts of a string of equavalence.

I think it is this kind of humility that Derrida wishes to assert. Yes, there is an idea of pure forgiveness. But can one possibly attain such purity? Will an attempt to offer true forgiveness invariably fail, leaving one with some sham forgiveness, conditioned, and instrumentalized?

Perhaps one way to interpret Derrida is to take his words as a caveat, that there is always a lack, a deficiency, in our act of forgiving. This means that every act of forgiving should imply a negotiation between the unconditional and the conditional, between the absolute and the relative.

That’s why it is appropriate to connect forgiving with fasting. As I said earlier, like everything else in religion, both fasting and forgiving are performances with a multiplicity of motives. You can view fasting as a test of your will power. But you can also see it as an acknowledgement of your own bodily presence that is limited, ephemeral - a site of unfulfilled desire. You can interpret fasting as an imposition of your mind as a sovereign ‘subject’ upon your body. On the other hand, you can also see it as a retreat into a dispossessed self.

Finally, I would like to argue that when fasting is a way of recognizing our limited and ephemeral self, and not as a powerful subject, there is a chance that we can forgive in the way of the human. It means to forgive not from a position of power; it means to forgive without a sense of sovereignty.

Perhaps it is only by such means that humankind finds its radical atonement. At least, through such an act of forgiving can we hope that violence will lose its reason to be.

Thank you.

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*This illustration is taken from HERE