Cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. Review on On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness - Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. Preface by Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. 60 pp.

Twice in the second essay of On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, his recently published volume, Jacques Derrida admits that forgiveness leaves him torn("partagé"). "I remain'torn, '" he writes, with reference to post-colonial violence in Algeria, "But without power, desire, or need to decide"(51). The essay proceeds by recovering the concept of forgiveness and exposing the ruse of political appropriations that sidestep, rather than uphold, justice in the name of reconciliation. Yet the double project of recovery and exposure leaves Derrida unable to decide between pure forgiveness in its impossibility and the practical, political demand for peace that forgiveness, however illegitimately, satisfies.

This division, this incapacity, which resembles the position from which unconditional forgiveness must emerge, if it is to emerge, not only responds to the relation between ethics and politics, but it describes their rapport sans rapport. Here - as in the essay "On Cosmopolitanism, "-ethics and politics remain "irreducible . . . indissociable.By thinking together a non-phenomenological ethics and the inescapable demands of politics, by recovering the division and the sharing of ethics and politics, these essays open a zone of responsibility(without knowledge or certainty) that coincides with(emerges from, eventuates in) the phrase "I remain torn." From this position of non-knowledge, the essays joined in this volume imagine new divisions and new - still unrecognizable - configurations: responses to, responses of an I, divided. It is this move that may further help us to distinguish Derridian responsibility from Levinasian ethics as first philosophy.

"On Cosmopolitanism, " the volume's opening essay, undertakes to redefine asylum and introduces the city - above and beyond the nation - as the site where a new mode of asylum might occur, if it could occur. The "City of Refuge" may not make manifest a pure concept of hospitality or of cosmopolitanism. Rather it returns questions of knowledge and strategy: "It is a question of knowing how to transform and improve the law, and of knowing if this.