Le Monde des Débats: Your seminar poses the question of forgiving. How much can one forgive? Can the pardon be collective, that is to say, political and historical?

Jacques Derrida: In principle, there is no limit to the pardon, no measure, no moderation, no "how much." On the condition, understood, of some "proper" sense of the word. What does one call "pardon"? What is it that calls for a "pardon"? Who calls, who calls something a pardon? It is as difficult to measure a pardon as to take the measure of such questions. For more reasons than I can be pressed to relate.
1 - In the first place, because one maintains the equivocal, notably in political debate which reactivates and displaces today this notion -- across the world they maintain the equivocal. They often confound, sometimes in a calculated way, the pardon with related themes: excuse, regret, amnesty, prescription, etc., so many significations which certain people raise to law, to a penal law for which the pardon must remain in principle heterogeneous and irreducible.
2 - If the concept of pardon remains enigmatic, it is because the scene, the figure, the language that they attempt to adjust belongs to a religious heritage (I say "abrahamique," to refer together to Judaism, the various Christianities and Islams). This tradition -- complex and differentiated, even conflicting -- is at once singular and on the way to universalization, across that which puts to work or brings to light a certain theatre of the pardon.
3 - From there -- and this is one of the threads of my seminar on the pardon (and perjury [parjure]) -- the very dimension of the pardon tends to be effaced in the course of this globalization, and with it all measure, all conceptual limit. In all the scenes of repenting, of plea, of pardon or excuse which have multiplied on the geopolitical scene since the last war, and in an accelerated way for some years, we see not only some individuals but entire communities, professional corporations, church representatives and hierarchs, sovereigns and chiefs of state asking for "pardon." They do this in an "abrahamique" language which is not (in the case of Japan or Korea, for example) that of the dominant religion of their society, but which has already become the universal idiom of law, of politics, of economics and diplomacy: at the same time the agent and the symptom of this internationalization. The proliferation of these scenes of repent and asking for "pardon" signify without doubt a universal urgency of memory: it is necessary to turn to the past; and at the same time it is necessary to carry this act of memory, of auto-accusation, of "repentance," of appearance, beyond the juridical instance and the instance of the nation-state. The question is what happens on this scale. The tracks are numerous. One trail of them leads regularly to a series of extraordinary events, these which, before and during World War II, had rendered possible, had in all cases "authorized," with the Nuremberg Tribunal, the international institution of a juridical concept such as this of "crime against humanity." That was a performative event of a scope still difficult to interpret.

Even if some words like "crime against humanity" circulate now in current language. This event was itself produced and authorized by an international community at a date and according to a determined figure of its history. Which is tangled up but not confounded with the history of a reaffirmation of the rights of man, of the new Declaration of the Rights of Man. This sort of mutation has structured the theatrical space in which plays, sincerely or not, the grand pardon, the grand scene of repent which occupies us. It often has the traits, even in its theatricality, of a grand convulsion -- would we dare say of a frenetic compulsion? No, it responds, also, fortunately, to a "good" movement. But the simulacrum, the automatic ritual, the hypocrisy, the calculation or the aping are often part of the show, and parasites are invited to this ceremony of culpability. We have all humanity shaken by a movement which wants to be unanimous, we have the human type which would pretend to be accused in one swoop, and publicly, and spectacularly, of all the crimes in effect committed by himself against himself, "against humanity." If we were to begin accusing people, in asking for pardon, of all the crimes of the past against humanity, there would not be an innocent on Earth -- and then not a single person in position to judge or arbitrate. We are all the heirs, at least, of persons or events marked, in an essential, interior, indelible way, by the crimes against humanity. Sometimes these events, these organized, cruel, mass murders, which could have been from revolutions, from grand Revolutions, canonical and "legitimate," were the very ones which permitted the emergence of concepts such as the rights of man or crime against humanity.

Whether we see an immense progress, a historic mutation or a concept still obscure in its limits, fragile in its foundation (and we can see one and the other at the same time -- I'd be so inclined, for my part), we cannot deny this fact: the concept of "crime against humanity" remains entirely on the horizon of the geopolitical for the pardon. It furnishes it with its discourse and its legitimation. Take the striking example of the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa. It remains unique despite the analogies -- analogies only -- of some South American precedents, in Chile, notably. Indeed, what has given ultimate justification, declared legitimacy to this commission, is the definition of apartheid as "crime against humanity" by the international community as represented by the United Nations.

This convulsion of which I spoke would take the form of a conversion today. Of a conversion of fact and universal tendency: on the way to globalization. For if, as I believe, the concept of crime against humanity is the principal charge of this auto-accusation, of this act of repent and of this pardon asked for; if on the other hand a sacredness of the human can only, as a last resort, justify this concept (nothing is worse, in this logic, than a crime against the humanity of man and against the rights of man); if this sacredness finds its sense in the abrahamique memory of the religions of the bible and in an interpretation that is Jewish, but ultimately Christian, of the "near" or the "similar"; if from that the crime against humanity is a crime against the most sacred in the living, and thus already against the divine in man, in God-made-man or man-made-God-by-God (the death of man and the death of God revealed as the same crime), then the "globalization" of the pardon resembles an immense scene of confession in process, thus a convulsion-conversion-confession virtually Christian, a process of Christianization which has no need of the Christian Church.

If, as I just suggested, such a language crosses and accumulates in itself these powerful traditions (the "abrahamique" culture and this of philosophical humanism, more precisely of a cosmopolitanism born itself from a graft of Stoicism and Pauline Christianity), why does it impose itself today in these cultures which are not originally European or "biblical"? I'm thinking of these scenes where the Japanese Prime Minister "asks for pardon" from Koreans and Chinese for past violence. He presented, of course, his "heartfelt apologies" in his own name, before engaging the Emperor as the head of state, but a Prime Minister always engages more than just a private person. Recently, there were veritable negotiations, this time official and closed, between the Japanese government and the South Korean government on this subject. There were reparations and a politico-economic reorientation. These maneuvers seek, as is almost always the case, to produce a reconciliation (national or international) propitious for a normalization. The language of the pardon, in the service of determined ends, has been anything but pure and disinterested. As is always the case in the political field.

I will take, then, the risk of this proposition: each time that the pardon is in the service of an end, even if it were noble and spiritual (financial or spiritual redemption, reconciliation, salvation), each time that it tends to re-establish a normality (social, national, political, psychological) by a work of mourning, by some therapy or ecology of the memory, then the "pardon" is not pure, nor is its concept. The pardon is not, it should not be normal, normative, normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, by proof of the impossible: as if it could interrupt the ordinary course of historic temporality.

It would be necessary, then, to interrogate from this point of view what is called globalization and what I propose to nick-name besides(1) "mondialatinisation" -- to take account of the effect of Roman Christianity which overdetermines today all the language of law, of the political, and even the interpretation of the so-called "return of the the religious." Any pretended disenchantment, any secularization does not interrupt it, quite the contrary.

To approach the presentation of the concept itself of pardon, logic and good sense are in accord for once with the paradox: it is necessary, it seems to me, based on the fact that, yes, there is the unpardonable. Is this not in truth the only thing to pardon? The only thing which calls for the pardon? If we were ready to pardon only that which seems pardonable, what the Church calls "venial sin," then the idea itself of pardon would vanish. If there is something to pardon, it would be what in religious language is called mortal sin, the worst, the unpardonable crime or wrong. From the aporia that can be described in its dry and implacable formality, without mercy: the pardon pardons only the unpardonable. One cannot or should not pardon, there is no pardon, if there is a pardon, other than where there is the unpardonable. Which is as much as to say that the pardon must be announced as the impossible itself. It can only be possible to do the im-possible. Because, in this century, the monstrous crimes ("unpardonable," then) have not only been committed -- this which is perhaps not in itself so new -- but have become visible, known, recalled, named, archived by a "universal conscience" better informed than ever, because these crimes both cruel and massive seem to escape or because some seek to make them escape, even in their excess, from the measure of all human justice, indeed, the call to the pardon is found in this (by the unpardonable itself, then!) reactivated, remotivated, accelerated.

From the moment the law of 1964 decided in France the imprescriptibility of crimes against humanity, a debate was opened. I note in passing that the juridical concept of the imprescriptible is in no way equivalent to the non-juridical concept of the unpardonable. You can maintain the imprescriptibility of a crime, put no limit on the duration of an inculpation or of a possible pursuit before the law, all in pardoning the guilty. Inversely, you can acquit or suspend a judgment and nonetheless refuse the pardon. It remains that the singularity of the concept of imprescriptibility (by opposition to "prescription" which has some equivalents in other occidental law, American, for example) perhaps holds in this that it also introduces, as the pardon or as the unpardonable, a sort of eternity or transcendance, the apocalyptic horizon of a last judgment: in the law beyond the law, in the history beyond history. This is a capital and difficult point. In a polemical text justly entitled "The Imprescriptible," Jankelevitch declares that it would not be a question of pardoning some crimes against humanity, against the humanity of man: not against "enemies" (political, religious, ideological), but against what makes the man a man -- meaning against the ability to pardon, itself. In an analogous fashion, Hegel, the great thinker of the "pardon" and of "reconciliation," said that all is pardonable except the crime against the spirit, meaning against the reconciliating power of the pardon. Certainly in the case of the Shoah, Jankelevitch insists overall on another argument, in his eyes decisive: it's much less a question of pardoning, in this case, when the criminals have not asked for pardon. They have not recognized their fault and have shown no remorse. This is at least what Jankelevitch maintains, a little hastily, perhaps.

I would be tempted to contest this conditional logic of exchange, this presupposition so widely held according to which one could only envision the pardon on the condition that it be asked for, in the course of a scene of repentance attesting to both the conscience of the fault, the transformation of the guilty and the engagement at least implicit in doing everything to avoid the return of the evil. That is an economic transaction which both confirms and contradicts the abrahamique tradition of which we speak. It is important to analyze at base the tension, at the heart of the heritage, between on the one hand the idea, which is also an exigency, of the unconditional, gracious, infinite, aneconomic pardon, accorded to the guilty precisely as guilty, without compensation, even to one who does not repent or ask for pardon, and on the other hand, as a large number of texts testify, across many difficulties and semantic refinements, a conditional pardon, proportionate to the recognition of the fault, to remorse and the transformation of the sinner who asks, then, explicitly, for pardon. And who consequently is no more at all guilty, but already an other, and better than the guilty. In this measure, and on this condition, it is no longer the guilty as such, but the one who is pardoned. One of the questions that is indissociable from this, and which interests me no less, concerns the essence of the heritage. What is it to inherit when the heritage carries an injunction, double and contradictory? An injunction which it is necessary to reorient, to interpret actively, performatively, but in the night, as if we would have to, without norm or pre-established criteria, reinvent memory?

Despite my admiring sympathy for Jankelevitch, and even if I understand what inspires this righteous anger, it's hard for me to concur. For example, when he multiplies the imprecations against the good conscience of "the German" or when he rages against the economic miracle of the mark and the prosperous obscenity of the good conscience, but most of all when he justifies refusing to forgive by the fact, or rather the allegation, of the unrepentant. He says in sum: "If they had begun, in repenting, by asking for forgiveness, we would be able to see about giving it to them, but this was not the case." It's so much more difficult for me to agree here than where, in what he himself calls his "book of philosophy," The Pardon, published earlier, Jankelevitch had been more accepting of the idea of the absolute pardon. He assumed then an inspiration that was Jewish and ultimately Christian. He spoke even of an imperative of love and a "hyperbolic ethic": of an ethic, then, which would be carried beyond laws, norms or any obligation. Ethical beyond the ethical, that is perhaps the undiscoverable place of the pardon. Nonetheless, even in that moment, and the contradiction remains, Jankelevitch would not go so far as allowing an unconditional pardon, one which would be given even if it where not asked for. 

The nerve of the argument, in "The Imprescriptible," and in the part entitled, "Forgive?," is that the singularity of the Shoah reaches the dimensions of the inexpiable. For the inexpiable, there could be no possible pardon, according to Janekelevitch, not a pardon which would have any sense, which would make sense. For the common and dominant axiom of the tradition, finally, and in my view the most problematic, is that the pardon must have sense. And the sense should be determined on the basis of salvation, of reconciliation, of redemption, of expiation, I would say even of sacrifice. For Jankelevitch, from the moment when one can no longer punish with a "punishment proportional to its crime," and when, consequently, the "punishment becomes almost indifferent," it is an affair of "the inexpiable" -- he also says of "the irreparable" (the word that Chirac used in his famous declaration on the crime against the Jews under Vichy: "France, on that day, committed the irreparable"). From the inexpiable or the irreparable, Jankelevitch concludes the unpardonable. And one cannot pardon, according to him, the unpardonable. This connection does not seem to me self-evident. For the reason that I said (what would a pardon be that could not pardon the unpardonable?) and because this logic continues to imply that the pardon remains correlative of a judgment and the counterpart of a possible punishment, of a possible expiation, of the "expiable."

Jankelevitch seems, then, to hold two things as given (as Arendt, for example, in The Condition of Modern Man):
1 -- the pardon must remain a human possibility -- I insist on these two words and above all on the anthropological trait which decides everything (for it's always a matter, at base, of knowing if the pardon is a possibility or not, that is to say, a faculty, thus a sovereign "I can," and a human ability or not),
2 -- this human possibility is the correlate of the possibility of punishing -- not of being avenged, to be sure, which is another thing, to which the pardon is even more foreign, but of punishing according to the law. "Punishment," says Arendt, "has in common with the pardon that it attempts to put an end to a thing which, without intervention, could continue indefinitely. It is thus very significant, it is a structural element of the domain of human affairs [I underline] that men be capable of forgiving what they cannot punish, and that they be incapable of punishing what is found unpardonable."

In "The Imprescriptible," then, and not in The Pardon, Jankelevitch enters this exchange, into this symmetry between punishing and forgiving: the pardon would have no more sense where the crime has become, like the Shoah, "inexpiable," "irreparable," out of proportion with all human measure. "The pardon is dead in the death camps," he says. Yes. At least as it becomes possible only from the moment where it appears impossible. Its history would begin, to the contrary, with the unpardonable. It is not in the name of an ethical or spiritual purism that I insist on this contradiction at the heart of the heritage, and on the necessity of maintaining the reference to an unconditional and aneconomic pardon: beyond the exchange and even the horizon of redemption or of reconciliation. If I said: "I forgive you on the condition that, asking for pardon, you thus changed and would no longer be the same," do I forgive? what do I forgive? and whom? what and whom? something or someone? First syntactic ambiguity, what's more, which should already detain us for a long time. Between the question "who?" and the question "what?". Does one pardon something, a crime, a fault, a wrong, meaning an act or a moment which does not exhaust the incriminated person and at the limit is not confounded with the guilty who remains irreducible to it? Or rather does one pardon someone, absolutely, no longer marking then the limit between the wrong, the moment of the fault, and on the other hand, the person one holds responsible or guilty? And in this last case (the question "who?"), is forgiveness asked of the victim or some absolute witness, God, for example such a God who prescribes forgiving the other (man) in order to be forgiven in turn? (The Church of France asked God for forgiveness, it did not repent directly or only before men, or before the victims, for example, the Jewish community, which had only been called to witness, but publicly, it is true, the pardon asked in truth of God, etc.) I must leave these immense questions open.

Imagine, then, that I forgive on the condition that the guilty repents, makes amends, asks for forgiveness and thus is changed by a new engagement, and who consequently would no longer be at all the same that was found guilty. In this case, can we still speak of a pardon? It would be too easy, from two sides: one would not pardon any other than the guilty himself. For there to be pardon, is it not necessary, on the contrary, to pardon the fault and the guilty as such, where the one and the other remain, as irreversible as the wrong, as the wrong itself, still capable of being repeated, unpardonably, without transformation, without amelioration, without repent or promise? Must not one maintain that a pardon worthy of the name, if there ever is one, must pardon the unpardonable, and without condition? And that this unconditionality is also inscribed, as its contrary, which is to say the condition of repenting, in "our" heritage? Even if this radical purity can seem excessive, hyperbolic, mad? For if I say, as I think it, that the pardon is crazy, and that it must remain a folly of the impossible, this is certainly not to exclude or disqualify it. It is perhaps even the only thing that happens, that surprises, as a revolution, the ordinary course of history, of politics and of law. And that means that it remains heterogeneous to the order of the political or of the juridical such as they are ordinarily understood. No one was ever able, in the ordinary sense of the word, to base a politics or a law on the pardon. In all the geopolitical scenes of which we could speak, more often the word "pardon" is abused. It's always a matter of negotiations more or less admitted, of calculated transactions, of conditions and, as Kant would say, of hypothetical imperatives. These schemes can certainly seem honorable. For example in the name of "national reconciliation," the expression to which De Gaulle, Pompidou and Mitterrand all had recourse in moments when they believed they had to take responsibility for effacing the debts of the crimes of the past, under the occupation or during the Algerian war. In France the highest responsible politicians have regularly kept to the same language: it is necessary to proceed with reconciliation by amnesty and to thus reconstitute national unity. This is a leitmotif of the rhetoric of every French chief of state and prime minister since the Second World War, without exception. It was literally the language of those who, after the first purification movement, ratified the great amnesty of 1951 for the crimes committed under the occupation. I heard one evening, in a document from archives, M. Cavaillet say, I cite it from memory, that he had, as a member of parliament, voted for the amnesty law of 1951 because it was necessary, he said, to "know how to forget"; more importantly at that moment, Cavaillet insisted gravely that he felt the communist danger was the most urgent. It was necessary to bring back to the national community all the anticommunists who, collaborators some years before, risked finding themselves excluded from the political field by a law too severe and by a purification a little too forgetful. To restore the national unity, that meant to rearm with all available forces for a combat which would continue, in peacetime or what was called cold war. There is always a strategic and political calculation in the general gesture of whoever offers reconciliation or amnesty, and it's always necessary to integrate this calculation in our analyses. "National reconciliation," this was again, as I said, the explicit language of De Gaulle when he returned for the first time to Vichy and there made his famous discourse on the unity, the unicity, of France; it was literally the discourse of Pompidou who spoke also, in a famous press conference, of "national reconciliation" and of overcoming division when he thanked Touvier; it was again the language of Mitterrand when he maintained, in several instances, that he was the guarantor of national unity, and more particularly when he refused to declare the guilt of France under Vichy (which he qualified, you know, as a power that was not legitimate or representative, appropriated by a minority of extremists, while we know it is more complicated, not only from a formal or legal standpoint, but we'll leave it). Inversely, when the national body can support without risk a minor division or even find its unity reinforced by some trial, by some archival works, by some "release of the repressed," while other calculations demand doing justice, more rigorously and publicly, to what is called the "duty of memory."

It's always the same concern: what to do so that the nation survives being torn, that the trauma ceases with the work of mourning, and that the nation-state is not paralyzed. But even when it could be justified, this "ecological" imperative of social and political health has nothing to do with the "pardon" which is thus taken rather lightly. The pardon does not amount to, it must never amount to a therapy of reconciliation. Let's return to the remarkable example of South Africa. Still in prison, Mandela believed he had to assume himself the decision of negotiating the principle of the procedure of amnesty. First, in order to permit the return of the exiles of the ANC. And in view of a national reconciliation without which the country would have been turned to fire and blood by vengeance. But no more than the acquittal, the dismissal, or even "grace" (we're talking about a juridico-political exception again), amnesty does not signify the pardon. When Desmond Tutu was named president of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he Christianized the language of an institution destined to treat uniquely crimes of political motivation (enormous problem which I will not touch, here, just as I leave aside analyzing the complex structure of the commission, in its relations with other judiciary processes and penal procedures which had to follow their course). With as much good will as confusion, it seems to me, Tutu, Anglican archbishop, introduced the vocabulary of repenting and forgiving. He was reproached for it, among other things, by a non-Christian part of the black community. Without speaking of the formidable stakes of translation that I can only here evoke, as the recourse to language itself, concerning also the second aspect of your question: is the scene of the pardon personal, face to face, or rather does one call for it by some institutional mediation? (And the language itself, the tongue is here a first such mediating institution.) In principle, then, always following a vein of the abrahamique tradition, the pardon must engage two singularities: the guilty (the "perpetrator," as they say in South Africa) and the victim. Where a third party intervenes, one can still speak of amnesty, of reconciliation, or reparation, etc. But certainly not of pure pardon, in the strict sense. The statute of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is quite ambiguous on this subject, as is the discourse of Tutu which oscillates between a non-penal and non-reparation logic of "pardon" (he says "restorative") and a judiciary logic of amnesty. We would have to analyze closely the equivocal instability of all these auto-interpretations.

By virtue of a confusion between the order of pardon and the order of justice, but also abusing their heterogeneity, as in fact the times of pardon escape the judicial process, it is always possible to pretend the scene of "immediate" and quasi-automatic pardon to escape justice. The possibility of this calculation always remains open and we could give many examples of it. And counter-examples. Thus, Tutu recounts that one day a black woman came to testify before the Commission. Her husband had been assassinated by police torturers. She spoke in her language, one of 11 languages officially recognized by the Constitution. Tutu interpreted her and translated as something like this, in his Christian idiom (Anglo-Anglican): "A commission or a government cannot forgive. Only I, ultimately, can do it. And I am not ready to forgive. Or for forgiving." Strong word difficult to get. This woman victim, this woman as victim (2) surely wanted to remind that the anonymous body of the state or of a public institution cannot forgive. It has neither the right nor the power; and that wouldn't have any sense besides. The representative of the state can judge but forgiving has nothing to do with judgment, justly. Nor even with the public or political space. Even if it were "just," the pardon would be just in a justice that has nothing to do with judiciary justice, with the law. There are courts of justice for that and theses courts never forgive, in the strict sense of the word. This woman wanted perhaps to suggest something else still: if anyone has some title for forgiving, it is only the victim and not a third-party institution. On the other hand, even if this wife was also a victim, the absolute victim, if one can say it, remains her dead husband. Only the dead could have, legitimately, considered forgiving. The survivor was not ready to be substituted abusively for the dead. Immense and sorrowful experience of the survivor: who would have the right of forgiving in the name of vanished victims? They are always absent, in a certain manner. Missing in essence, they are never themselves absolutely present, at the moment pardon is asked for, as the same they were the moment of the crime; and they are sometimes absent in body, which is to say, dead. I return to an instant of the equivocal in the tradition. One moment the pardon (given by God or inspired by the divine prescription) must be a gracious gift, without exchange and without condition; another moment, it requires, as its minimal condition, the repenting and transformation of the sinner. What consequence is drawn from this tension? At least this, which doesn't simplify things: if our idea of forgiving falls to ruin when it is deprived of its absolute pole of reference, that is, its unconditional purity, it remains nonetheless inseparable from what is heterogeneous to it, that is the order of conditions, repenting, transformation, as many things permit to be inscribed in history, law, politics, existence itself. These two poles, the unconditional and the conditional, are absolutely heterogeneous, and must remain irreducible to each other. They are nevertheless indissociable: if we want, and it is necessary, the pardon to be effective, concrete, historical, if we want it to happen, that it have a place in changing things, it is necessary that its purity is engaged in a series of all sorts of conditions (psychological, political, etc.). It is between these poles, irreconcilable but indissociable, that decisions are to be made and responsibilities taken.

But despite all the confusions which reduce the pardon to amnesty or to amnesia, to acquittal or to prescription, to the work of mourning or some political therapy of reconciliation, in short to some historical ecology, it should never be forgotten, however, that all that refers to a certain pure and unconditional idea of the pardon without which this discourse would not have the least sense. What complicates the question of "sense" is still this, I suggested a moment ago: the pure and unconditional pardon, to have its proper sense, must have no "sense," no finality, not even intelligibility. It is a folly of the impossible. It would be necessary to follow without faltering the consequence of this paradox or this aporia. What is called the right of grace provides an example of this, one example among others and the exemplary model. For if it is true that the pardon must remain heterogeneous to the juridico-political order, judiciary or penal, if it is true that it must, each time, each occurrence, remain an absolute exception, then there is an exception to this law of exception, of some sort, and it is justly, in the West, this theological tradition which accords to the sovereign an exorbitant right. For the right of grace is, as the name indicates, of the order of rights, but of a right which inscribes in the law a power above the law. The absolute monarch of divine right can grant a pardon to a criminal, which means to practice, in the name of the state, a pardon which transcends and neutralizes the law. Law above the law. As the idea of sovereignty itself, this right of grace has been reappropriated in the republican heritage. In the modern, democratic type of state, as in France, they would say that it has been secularized (if this word had a sense besides that in the religious tradition which it maintains in pretending to be outside it). In the others, such as the United States, secularization is not even a simulacrum, since the president and the governors, who have the right of grace (pardon, clemency), first take oath on the Bible, hold official discourses of a religious type and invoke the name or the benediction of God each time they address the nation. What counts in this absolute exception that is the right of grace is that the exception of the right, the exception to the right is situated at the summit or the foundation of the juridico-political. In the body of the sovereign, it incarnates that which founds, sustains or raises, more highly, with the unity of the nation, the guaranty of the constitution, the conditions and the exercise of the law. As is always the case, the transcendental principle of a system does not belong to the system. It is foreign to it as an exception. 

Without contesting the principle of this right of grace, the more "elevated" it is, the more noble but also the the more "slippery" and the more equivocal, the more dangerous, the more arbitrary, Kant recalls the strict limitation that it would be necessary to impose on it so that it doesn't allow the worst injustices: that the sovereign be able to grant pardon only where the crime concerns himself (and thus concerns, in his body, the very guaranty of the law, of the state of the law and of the state). As in the Hegelian logic of which we spoke above, the only unpardonable crime is against what gives the power to forgive, the crime against the pardon, in sum -- the spirit according to Hegel, and what he calls the spirit of Christianity -- but it is justly this unpardonable, and this unpardonable only, that the sovereign yet has the right to forgive, and only when the "body of the king," in its sovereign function, is concerned through the other "body of the king," which is here the "same," the body of flesh, singular and empirical.

Outside of this absolute exception, in all the other cases, everywhere where the wrongs concern the subjects themselves, that is to say almost always, the right of grace would not be exercised without injustice. In fact, we know that it is always exercised in a conditional fashion, as a function of an interpretation or calculation, on the part of the sovereign, where a particular interest (his own proper or those of his family or friends or of a fraction of society) crosses the interest of the state. A recent example of this could be that of Clinton -- who had never been inclined to grant pardon to anyone and who is a rather active partisan of the death penalty. Then, he just recently utilized his "right to pardon" for some Puerto Ricans who'd been imprisoned a long time for terrorism. Of course the Republicans have not failed to contest this absolute privilege of the executive, accusing the President of trying to help Hillary Clinton in her election campaign in New York, where there are, as you know, many Puerto Ricans.

In the case both exceptional and exemplary of the right of grace, where what exceeds the juridico-political is inscribed, to establish it, in constitutional law, of course there is and there is not this personal head to head or face to face, and which one can think is expressed by the essence itself of the pardon. Where even this must engage only some absolute singularities, it cannot be manifested in some way without calling for it to a third party, to the institution, the sociality, the transgenerational heritage, the survivors in general; and first to this universalizing instance that is language. Can there be, one way or another, a scene of pardon without a shared language? This sharing is not only that of a national language or an idiom, but that of an accord on the sense of words, their connotations, the rhetoric, the object of a reference, etc. That is another form of the same aporia: when the victim and the guilty share no language, when nothing in common or universal permits them to understand each other, the pardon seems deprived of sense, it's precisely a matter of this absolute unpardonable, with this impossibility of forgiving which we said, however, a moment ago was, paradoxically, the very element of any possible pardon. To forgive, it is necessary on the one hand to be understood, from two sides, on the nature of the fault, to know who is guilty of what wrong to whom, etc. A thing already quite improbable. You imagine what a "logic of the unconscious" would come to perturb in this "knowledge," and in all these schemes in which remains nonetheless a "truth." And you imagine also what would happen when the same perturbation would make everything tremble, when it would come to resound in the "work of morning," in the "therapy" of which we spoke, and in the law and politics. For if a pure pardon cannot, if it must not be presented as such, to be exhibited in the theater of consciousness without in the same stroke being denied, lying or reaffirming a sovereignty, then how to know that it is a pardon, if it ever took place, and who forgives whom, what of whom? On the other hand, if it is necessary, as we said just now, to be understood, from two sides, on the nature of the fault, to know, in conscience, who is guilty of what wrong to whom, etc., and if the thing remains already very improbable, the contrary is also true. At the same time, it is necessary in effect that the alterity, the non-identification, even the incomprehension remain irreducible. The pardon is then crazy, it must be plunged, but lucidly, into the night of the intelligible. Call it the unconscious or the non-conscious, if you want. Where the victim "understands" the criminal, where he exchanges, speaks, understands with him, the scene of reconciliation has begun, and with it this common pardon which is anything but a pardon. Even if I say, "I do not forgive you," to someone who asks me to forgive, but whom I understand and who understands me, then a process of reconciliation has begun, the third party has intervened. Nevertheless, it is finished with the pure pardon.

In the most terrible situations, in Africa, in Kosovo, is it not a matter, precisely, of a barbarism of proximity, where the crime fomented between people who knew each other? Does the pardon not imply the impossible: to be at the same time another thing than the previous situation, before the crime, being entirely in the comprehension of the previous situation?

Jacques Derrida: In what you call the "previous situation," there could be in effect all sorts of proximities: language, neighborhood, familiarity, even family, etc. But for the trouble to erupt, the "radical evil" and perhaps worse still, the unpardonable wrong, the only thing that makes the question of pardon appear, it is necessary that, in the most intimate of this intimacy, an absolute hatred comes to interrupt peace. This destructive hostility can only be aimed at what Levinas calls the "visage" of the other, the similar other, the closest neighbor, between the Bosnian and the Serb, for example, in the interior of the same quarter, of the same building, sometimes the family. Must the pardon, then, saturate the abyss? Must it suture the wound in the process of reconciliation? Or rather give way to another peace, without forgetting, without amnesty, fusion or confusion? Of course no one would dare decently to object to the imperative of reconciliation. It is more worthy to put an end to the crimes and to the divisions. But one more time, I believe we must distinguish between the pardon and this process of reconciliation, this reconstitution of a health or of a "normality," so necessary and desirable that they can seem to traverse amnesia, the "work of mourning," etc. A "finalized" pardon is not a pardon, it's only a political strategy or a psychotherapeutic economy. In Algeria today, despite the infinite grief of the victims and the irreparable wrong they suffer forever, one can think, certainly, that the survival of the country, of the society and the state passes by the process of reconciliation announced. One can from this point of view "comprehend" that a vote has approved the politics promised by Bouteflika.

But I believe the word "pardon" pronounced on this occasion was inappropriate, in particular by the Algerian chief of state. I find it unjust both with respect for the victims of atrocities (no chief of state has the right of forgiving in their place) and with respect for the sense of the word, for the non-negotiable, aneconomic, apolitical and non-strategic unconditionality that it prescribes. But once again, this respect of the word or of the concept does not translate a semantic or philosophical purism. All sorts of unavowable "politics," all sorts of strategic ruses can be sheltered abusively behind a "rhetoric" or a "comedy" of the pardon to cut corners with the law. In politics, when it's a matter of analyzing, of judging, even of practically countering these abuses, the conceptual demand must be strict, even where it takes account of, in preoccupying with or declaring, paradoxes or aporia. It is, once again, the condition of responsibility.

You are then permanently divided between a "hyperbolically" ethical vision of the pardon, the pure pardon, and the reality of a society at work in the pragmatic process of reconciliation?

Jacques Derrida : Yes, I remain "divided," as you so well put it. But without being able, willing, or obligated to choose. The two poles are irreducible to each other, certainly, but they remain indissociable. To alter the "political" or what you just called the "pragmatic process," to change the law (which is caught between the two poles, the "ideal" and the "empirical" -- and what matters to me here is, between the two, this universalizing mediation, this history of the law, the possibility of the progress of the law), it is necessary to be referred to what you just called "hyperbolically ethical vision of the pardon." Even though I'm not sure of these words "vision" or "ethical," in this case, let us say that only this inflexible demand can orient a history of law, and evolution of rights. It's the only thing that can inspire, here, now, urgently, without waiting, the response and responsibilities.

Let's return to the question of the rights of man, of the concept of crime against humanity, but also of sovereignty. More than ever, these three motifs are linked in public space and in political discourse. Even though often a certain notion of sovereignty is positively associated with the right of the person, with the right to autodetermination, to the ideal of emancipation, in truth even the idea of liberty, in principle the rights of man, it is often in the name of the rights of man and to punish or prevent crimes against humanity that they try to limit, or intend at least, by international interventions, to limit the sovereignty of certain nation-states. But certain among them, more so than others. Recent examples: the interventions in Kosovo or in East Timor, although different in their nature and aim. (The case of the Gulf War is complicated in another way: today they limit the sovereignty of Iraq but after having pretended to defend against it the sovereignty of a small state -- and in passing some other interests, but we'll pass). We are always attentive, as Hannah Arendt also recalls lucidly, to the fact that this limitation of sovereignty is only imposed where it is "possible" (physically, militarily, economically), which is to say, always imposed on small states, relatively weak, by powerful states. These latter remain jealous of their own sovereignty in limiting that of others. They also impose on the decisions of international institutions, in a decisive fashion. 

It is an order and a "state of fact" which can be quite consolidated in the service of the "powerful" or, on the contrary, little by little dislocated, in crisis, menaced by some concepts (that is to say here some instituted performatives, some events by essence historical and transformable), such as the new "rights of man" or "crime against humanity," by the conventions on genocide, torture or terrorism. Between these two hypotheses, all depends on the politics these concepts are serving. Despite their roots and timeless foundations, these concepts are very young, at least as far as the decisions of international law. And when, in 1964 -- it was yesterday -- France considered it opportune to decide that crimes against humanity would remain imprescriptible (decision which rendered possible all the trials you know -- even yesterday that of Papon), it implicitly called for it to a sort of beyond the law in the law. The imprescriptible, as a juridical notion, is certainly not the unpardonable, we saw why a moment ago. But, I come back to it, the imprescriptible makes a sign towards the transcendent order of the unconditional, of the pardon and the unpardonable, towards a sort of ahistoricity, an eternity and Last Judgment which surpass history and the finite time of the law: forever, eternally, everywhere and always, a crime against humanity will be liable to judgment, and no one will ever efface the judicial archive. It is then a certain idea of the pardon and of the unpardonable, of a certain beyond of the law (of all historic determination of the law) which inspired the legislators and the members of parliaments, those who produce the law, when, for example, they instituted in France the imprescriptibility of the crimes against humanity or, in a more general fashion when they transform international law and install universal courts. That shows, of course, despite its theoretical, speculative, purist, abstract appearance that all reflection on an unconditional demand is engaged in advance, and through and through, in a concrete history. It can induce some processes of transformation -- political, juridical, but in truth without limit.

That said, since you asked me to what extent I am "divided" before these apparently insoluble difficulties, I would be tempted by two types of response. On the one hand, there is, there must be, it is necessary to accept, the "insoluble." In politics and beyond. When the givens of a problem or a task do not appear infinitely contradictory, placing me before the aporia of a double injunction, then I know in advance what is necessary to do, I believe I know, this knowing commands and programs the action: it's fact, there is no more decision or responsibility. A certain non-knowing must to the contrary leave me disarmed before what I have to do if I am to do it, so that I feel freely obliged and held to respond to it. It seems necessary to me then, and only then, to respond to this transaction between two contradictory and equally justified imperatives. Not that I fail to know. To the contrary, it is necessary to know the most and in the best possible way, but between the most understood, refined, necessary knowledge and the responsible decision, an abyss remains and must remain. Here is where you find again the distinction of the two orders (indissociable but heterogeneous) which preoccupy us from the beginning of this interview. On the other hand, if we call the "political" what you designate in speaking of "pragmatic process of reconiliation," then, considering seriously these political urgencies, I believe also that we are not defined in all respects by the political, and above all not by citizenship, by the statutory membership in a nation-state. Must we not accept that, at the heart of reason, above all when it is a question of "forgiving," something happens that exceeds all institution, all power, any juridico-political instance? We can imagine that someone, victim of the worst, for himself, or his family, in his generation or the previous one, demands that justice be rendered, that the criminals be brought to trial, judged and condemned -- and nevertheless in his heart forgives.

And the inverse?

Jacques Derrida: The inverse also, of course. We can imagine, and accept, that someone never forgives, even after an acquittal or amnesty. The secret of this experience remains. It must remain intact, inaccessible to the law, to the political, even to the moral: absolute. But I would make of this trans-political principle a political principle, a rule or a political position: it is also necessary to respect, in the political, the secret, what exceeds the political or what is not a matter of the juridical. That is what I would call "democracy to come." In the radical evil of which we speak and consequently in the enigma of the pardon and the unpardonable, there is a sort of "madness" that the juridico-political cannot approach, even less appropriate. Imagine a victim of terrorism, a person whose throat has been cut or whose children have been deported, or one whose family is dead in a crematory oven. That she says "I forgive" or "I do not forgive," in the two cases, I am not sure of understanding, I am even sure of not understanding and in any case I have nothing to say. This zone of the experience remains inaccessible and I must respect the secret of it. What remains to be done, afterwards, publicly, politically, juridically, also remains difficult. Take the example of Algeria again. I understand, I even share the desire of these who say: "It is necessary to make peace, it is necessary for the country to survive, it suffices, these monstrous murders, it is necessary to do what it takes to make them stop," and if, for that, ruse is necessary to the point of lying or confusion (as when Bouteflika says: "We are going to free the political prisoners who don't have blood on their hands"), well, if that's how this abusive rhetoric goes, it will not have been the first in recent history, less recent history and certainly not in the colonial history of this country. I understand then this "logic," but I understand also the opposite logic which refuses at all costs, and in principle, this useful mystification. This is the moment of the greatest difficulty, the law of the responsible transaction. Depending on the situation and the moment, the responsibilities are different. One should not do, it seems to me, in France today what they are preparing to do in Algeria. French society today can be permitted to bring to light, with an inflexible rigor, all the crimes of the past (including the ones they renew in Algeria, precisely, and the thing is not yet done), it can judge them and not leave memory sleeping. There are some situations where, to the contrary, it is necessary, if not to put memory to sleep (that would never be necessary, if it were possible), at least make it as if, on the public scene, one would renounce drawing from it all the conclusions. One is never sure of making the just choice, one would never know, one will never know it by what is called knowledge. The future will give us no more to know, for it will have been determined, itself, by this choice. It is there that the responsibilities are to be reevaluated at each instant according to the concrete situations, which means those that don't wait, those that do not give us the time for infinite deliberation. The response cannot be the same in Algeria today, yesterday or tomorrow, and in the France of 1945, of 1968-70, or of 2000. It is more than difficult, it is infinite anguish. It is the night. But to recognize these "contextual" differences is an entirely other thing than an empiricist, relativist or pragmatist resignation. Justly so because the difficulty arises in the name and in the reason of unconditional principles, irreducible to these facilities (empiricist, relativist or pragmatist). In any case, I would not take the terrible question of the word "pardon" back to these "processes" in which it is found engaged in advance, as complex and inevitable as they are.

What remains complicated is this circulation between the political and the hyperbolical ethic. Few nations can escape the fact, perhaps fundamental, that there have been crimes, violence, a founding violence, to speak as René Girard, and the theme of pardon becomes quite convenient for justifying, afterwards, the history of the nation.

Jacques Derrida: Every nation-state is born and founded in violence. I believe this is an incontestable truth. Without even exhibiting on this subject some atrocious spectacles, it suffices to underline a law of structure: the moment of foundation, the instituting moment is anterior to the law or the legitimacy it establishes. It is thus outside the law, and violent by virtue of that. But you know that we could "illustrate" (what a word, here!) this abstract truth with terrifying documents, from the history of all the states, the oldest and the youngest. Before the modern forms of what is called, in the strict sense, "colonialism," all the states (I would even dare to say, without playing too much on the word and the etymology, all the cultures) have their origin in an aggression of a colonial type. This founding violence is not only forgotten. The foundation is is made to occult it; it tends by essence to organize amnesia, sometimes under the celebration and the sublimation of grand commencements. What appears singular today, not seen before, is the project of bringing the states or at least the chiefs of state as such (Pinochet), and even some acting chiefs of state (Milosevic) before universal authorities. That's only a matter of projects or hypotheses, but this possibility suffices to announce a mutation: it constitutes by itself a major event. The sovereignty of the state, the immunity of a chief of state are no longer, in principle, by right, untouchable. Though it's understood that numerous equivocations will remain for a long time, for which it's necessary to redouble vigilance. We are far from passing to action and putting these projects to work, because international law still depends too much on sovereign and powerful nation-states. What's more, when someone does proceed to act, in the name of the universal rights of man or against some "crimes against humanity," it's often in a partisan fashion, in view of complex and sometimes contradictory strategies, at the mercy of states not only jealous of their own sovereignty but dominant on the international scene, pressed to intervene here rather than or sooner than there, for example in Kosovo rather than Chechnya, to limit this to some recent examples, etc., and excluding, of course, all intervention in these places; hence for example the hostility of China to all intrusion of this type in Asia, in Timor, for example -- which could give ideas to those on the side of Tibet; or more the reticence of the United States, and even of France, but also of certain so-called "Southern" countries, before the universal competence promised to the International Penal Court, etc.

We return regularly to this story of sovereignty. And since we speak of the pardon, what renders the "I forgive you" sometimes unsupportable or odious, even obscene, is the affirmation of sovereignty. It is addressed often from high and low, it confirms its own liberty or arrogates the power to pardon, whether as victim or in the name of the victim. It is necessary also to think of an absolute victimization, something that deprives the victim of life, or of the right to speak, or of this liberty, this force and power which authorize, which allow access to the position of "I forgive." There, the unpardonable would consist of depriving the victim of the right to speech, or speech itself, of the possibility of any expression or protest, of testimony. The victim would be then victim, all the more, for being stripped of the minimal, elementary possibility of virtually considering forgiving the unforgivable. This absolute crime is not produced only in the figure of the murder. Immense difficulty, then. Each time that the pardon is effectively exercised, it seems to suppose some sovereign power. That can be the sovereign power of a noble and strong soul, but also a power of state with uncontested legitimacy at its disposal, the power necessary for organizing a trial, an applicable judgment or, eventually, the acquittal, amnesty or pardon. If, as Jankelevitch and Arendt claim (I mentioned my reservations on this subject), one could only forgive where one could judge and punish, thus evaluate, then establishing, instituting a process of judgment supposes a power, a force, a sovereignty. You're familiar with the "revisionist" argument: the Nuremberg tribunal was the invention of the conquerors, it remained at their disposal as much for establishing the right to judge and condemn as for the innocent, etc. What I dream, what I try to think as the "purity" of a pardon worthy of the name, would be a pardon without power: unconditional but without sovereignty. The most difficult task, at once necessary and apparently impossible, would be then to dissociate unconditionality and sovereignty. Will we do it some day? It won't happen tomorrow, as they say. But since the hypothesis of this unpresentable task is announced, even if as a dream for thought, this madness is perhaps not so mad.

Remarks collected by Michel Weiviorka

(1) Editor's note Cf. "Faith and Knowledge, The Two Sources of 'Religion' at the Limits of Simple Reason," in Religion, J. Derrida and G. Vattimo, Le Seuil, 1996.
(2) There would be much to say here on sexual differences, when it is a matter of victims and their testimony. Tutu recounts also how certain women forgave in the presence of the torturers. But Antje Krog, in an admirable book, The Country of My Skull, also describes the situation of militant women who, violated and first accused by the torturers of not being militants but prostitutes, could not even testify before the commission, not even in their families, without baring themselves, without showing their scars or without being exposed again, even by their testimony, to another violence. The "question of the pardon" could not even be posed publicly to these women, some of which are now in high positions of the state. There exists a "Gender Commission" an this subject in South Africa.