instigate a reciprocal reaction, because gifts—if they are gifts truly and purely given—must not create an imbalance of power, whereby the recipient of a gift becomes indebted to the donating party. This debt, because it necessitates taking from the donee, is a form of harm. Gift giving becomes, according to Derrida, harmful the moment “the gift puts the other in debt, with the result that giving amounts to hurting, to doing harm.”67 Derrida is consequently critical of how gifts can be used as a means for donors—as debtholders—to maintain, express, and extend their power over others. He is adamant that a “theory of the gift” must be “powerless by its very essence.”68 But such a statement evokes yet another paradox: that gifts must be given by a party empowered enough to give a gift but without acting upon or generating any new anatomies of power. Forgiveness, as a type of gift, must come from a place of power, while—at the same time—remaining powerless. Derrida writes: “What I try to think as the ‘purity’ of a forgiveness worthy of its name, would be a forgiveness without power: unconditional but without sovereignty.”69 Such a pernicious, hierarchical relation of power is one that I contend can be mitigated by the state of equality characteristic of public, political interactions occurring between civically equal friends in the “world.”
D. Confronting the Aporias of Forgiveness
Although the intersection of aporias that structure the logic of forgiveness transforms this notion into a “mad” pursuit, a sort of “madness of the impossible,” Derridean deconstruction demands an experience of the aporetic nature of forgiving because it is through the paralysis induced by these paradoxes that one can begin to take responsibility for one’s decisions and actions. In other words, it is in the face of such aporias that deconstruction not only destroys ideas, words, concepts, themes, and so on—intervening in a particular “context”—but also acts as a form of criticism which is animated by an “undeconstructable concern for justice.” By revealing the unsolvable paradoxes of the conditional and unconditional, the forgivability of the unforgivable, and the powerful powerlessness that structure the logic of this notion, Derrida shows how the notion of forgiveness does not pose any “problems.” Rather, this idea is one which is inherently aporetic. Thus, to consider forgiveness, and to practice it, is to express a willingness to “go through pain and aporia,”70 which is to experience the sheer “madness” of a moment that is characterized by its “undecidability.” It is consequently necessary to confront fearlessly the experience of (im)possibility that the aporetic logic of this notion begets, doing so in such a manner that we retain a radical openness to the “face” of the (unknown) Other and thus seek to act ever more justly toward the stranger who appears before us.
Despite the fact that Derrida asserts that the paradoxicality of forgiveness cannot be escaped, he nevertheless encourages his readers to confront the aporetic logic of this idea by locating a compromise between the extremes of the aporias inherent to the act of forgiving. To appeal both to the conditional and unconditional strands of forgiveness is a process that Derrida describes as a “negotiation”71 between two opposing polarities. Although I consider Derrida’s notion of negotiation in terms of Arendt’s Kantian conceptualization of the imagination in chapter 4, it is important to underscore here that a Derridean understanding of negotiating requires us to think in a “to-and-fro” manner, “between two positions, two poles, two choices [. . .] always [going] from one to the other [. . .] [without] establishing oneself anywhere.”72 Derrida directly links this back-and-forth, leisure-less mental activity to his notion of responsibility when he states:
We have to negotiate between the unconditional and conditional. They cannot be dissociated, although we know they are absolutely heterogeneous and incommensurable. It is because these incommensurable poles are indissociable that we have to take responsibility, a difficult responsibility, to negotiate the best response in an impossible situation.73
In this sense, experiencing forgiveness is necessarily a negotiation between the pure and impure, between the human and superhuman, and between the possible and the impossible. Because there is no formula that can be used to overcome the aporetic character of the conceptual relationships that structure the logic of forgiveness, Derrida suggests that it is only possible to confront the paradox of forgiveness by appealing simultaneously to both the conditional and the unconditional, privileging—to the greatest extent possible—the hyperbolic ethical demand of that which is infinite and unfathomable.
Departing from this understanding of how to act responsibly in the face of the aporetic, the subsequent chapters of this book present a series of what may be considered conceptual “negotiations,” theorizing both a form of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism that addresses the paradoxical issues inherent to these two ideas. I attempt to confront the aporias that Derrida’s analysis reveals in order to theorize a political forgiveness that overcomes—as far as is theoretically possible—the paradoxes and pitfalls identified by a deconstruction of the faculty of forgiving. To do so, I use Arendt’s work to theorize forgiveness as a form of “caring for the world.” I demonstrate that in caring for worldly, public spaces—which are constituted by the relationships that are formed between actors in the political realm—forgiveness protects freedom and “power.” It is by thinking in terms of an Arendtian notion of power, and the experience of freedom which accompanies it, that we can pass through the aporetic impasse revealed by a Derridean deconstruction. A care-based conceptualization of forgiveness, as a political practice performed in public spaces and during moments which are thoroughly conditioned, is an approach that allows for the experience of a certain miraculousness associated with the seemingly preternatural power of this idea/practice.
3. Derrida: On Cosmopolitanism
In the final section of this chapter, I focus on Derrida’s deconstruction of cosmopolitanism, examining his understanding of cosmopolitanism by investigating three key aspects of his work, all of which frame my theorization of cosmopolitan theory in the latter half of this book. I cast light upon his understanding of (un)conditional hospitality, his argument for “cities of refuge,” and his perspective on mondialisation. Derrida’s deconstruction of cosmopolitanism serves as an ideal departure point from which to begin constructing my own theory of this idea: a “caring cosmopolitanism” inspired by an Arendtian conception of “the political” and a Derridean understanding of radically welcoming the (unknown) Other.
Derrida’s examination of cosmopolitan theory, like his discussion of the notion of forgiveness, uncovers the logical structure of cosmopolitanism that has been fundamentally shaped by Christian doctrine. In particular, he shows that cosmopolitanism is a notion that developed in terms of a Christianization of Stoic philosophy, before evolving as part of Kant’s conception of universal hospitality, which Derrida understood to be at the conceptual core of its contemporary manifestations. To provide an overview of his genealogical movement into the historical “text” that constitutes le héritage, Derrida writes:
We could identify the cosmopolitan (cosmopolitique) tradition common to a certain Greek stoicism and a Pauline Christianity, of which the inheritors were the figures of the Enlightenment, and to which Kant will doubtlessly have given the most rigorous philosophical formulation in his famous Definitive Article in View of Perpetual Peace: “The law of cosmopolitanism must be restricted to the conditions of universal hospitality.”74
Kant’s account of hospitality holds special significance in the history of political thought, though it was the Apostle Paul, whose “language continues to structure and condition the modern concepts of the rights of man or crimes against humanity,”75 and who transmuted a certain Ciceronian conception of cosmopolitanism.76 Derrida aims to disentangle this notion from its religious roots in order to construct a secular, humanist form of cosmopolitan theory. According to Hent de Vries, Derrida “turns to religion” as a means of “trivializ[ing]” the role of the religious by “stripping” religion of its “ontological and axiological privilege.”77 In line with Heidegger’s approach
