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forsakes becoming a criminal aligning with the perpetrator and tries to free herself from the immurement of the revenge fantasy. By the act of forgiving, the victim can purposefully forgets and lets go of the past, although forgetting is not necessarily a detrimental way when it comes to dealing with trauma. I am afraid the forgetting will become a disguise of repression. This forgetting is not like what we say about
reforming memories and getting rid of details that is not necessary for our lives. This forgetting is an act of avoidance. This kind of avoidance is still not the true
forgiveness I have brought up. The victim, as Herman states, “imagines that she can transcend her rage and erase the impact of trauma through a willed, defiant act of love.
But it is not possible to exorcise the trauma, through either hatred or love” (189-90).
For Herman, true forgiveness exists, but it still remains out of reach by human beings.
Kristeva also seconds Herman’s understanding of forgiveness that there are conditions for forgiveness, such as confession, repentance, and restitution (Herman190). As Herman so adamantly contends, the fantasy of revenge and that of forgiveness are both “impediment to mourning” (190).
3.3 Forgiveness as Suspension of Judgment
After pondering on some myths of forgiveness, I am going to explicate further about the true nature of forgiveness, at least to present what I picture it to be.
According to Julia Kristeva’s definition of forgiveness,
[F]orgiveness is understood to be the suspension of judgment. It is the act by which one forbids judging and stops time, which proceeds toward vengeance, and allows the person who committed the reprehensible act to begin anew, to take up another life and another activity. (281)
Judgment has been playing a major role in the human world, since law itself is the embodiment of judgment. As Agamben suggests, “law is not directed toward the
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establishment of justice” (Remnants 18). Instead, “Law is solely directed toward judgment, independent of truth and justice” (Remnants 18). Truth and justice have been the central concerns for Singer. She believes that the legal authority will not do justice to her family’s misfortune. The law will put Joseph Webber to jail after many frivolous paper works and processes. The ligitimate authority will sue him for his conduct in participating activities of Nazi, but he will never be able to pay any contrition to her grandmother and her sister. In front of law, the misfortune of her family is too trivial under the context of Holocaust, an enormous event dealing with more than six million people’s lives. That’s why she decides to seek justice by herself.
At that point, she confirms Agamben’s statement that law has its limit when it comes to a real justice—whether it is a satisfactory vengeance or something else. Singer also proves that “punishment does not follow from judgment. . . Judgment is itself
punishment” (Remnants 18). Since she jumps over tribunals of law for Nazi criminals and practices justice by herself, her judgment—assuming he is the brutal
Reiner—toward Franz is a punishment already. Judging him as the evil Reiner is to erase Franz’s kindness back then in the camp and to ignore his remorse. This judgment is so powerful as to facilitate the happening of killing the wrong man.
Kristeva’s call for suspension of judgment therefore displays its own importance here.
In fact, her discrete definition of forgiveness leaves broader space for both victims and perpetrators to look out the wound the traumatic event causes and to listen to the inner voice that has been repressed. As Heidi Grunebaum says, forgiveness is
“deferred outcome of a long process that includes mourning the loss, honoring the dead, restituting the land, and reclaiming the language of resistance and survival over the silence of abjection, trauma, and despair” (308). From the way I see it, it is like a process of healing. Forgiveness is directed toward healing for both the perpetrators
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and the victims, and it is “not as an erasure but as a recognition of the suffering, the crime, and the possibility of the beginning again” (Kristeva, Forgiveness 282).
“[F]orgiveness is neither sorrow (meaning: it does not imply a complacency with abjection and horror) nor loving tribunal, but the act of ‘bestowing a gift’ that
‘prevails over judgment’” (Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness 192). Kristeva would rather think forgiveness as an act of “bestowing a gift.” That is, victims are
unexpected givers. They can be merciful enough to bestow a gift that is not supposed to be perpetrators’. It prevails over judgment because certainly the power of giving is more tremendous. “It is about temporarily suspending the time of the ego, which is the time of hatred, by applying a sinful meaning to hatred acts, referring to the mercy of the Absolute Being: God” (Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness 192). It stops time because it doesn’t let the natural time to wear out the past as perpetrators want it to be.
It stops time so that the victims won’t be trapped in-between the present and the past.
It is a mercy, a pardon, and a gift for whoever is involved in the misfortune.
Inspired by Derrida’s saying that forgiveness is directed to the unforgivable or it does not exist, Paul Ricoeur thinks the unforgivable presupposes forgiveness.
However, the unforgivable is not necessarily and definitely followed by forgiveness.
The proclamation “there is forgiveness” implies that
the ‘there is’ of the voice of forgiveness says this in its own way. This is why I will speak of this voice as a voice from above. . . It is a silent voice but not a mute one. Silent, because there is no clamor of what rages; not mute, because not deprived of speech. An appropriate discourse is in fact dedicated to it, the hymn. . . For the hymn has no need to say who
forgives and to whom forgiveness is directed. (Ricoeur 467)
Ricoeur’s words put forgiveness back to the context of religion. A hymn from above
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appears to be the voice of forgiveness. As if forgiveness is not realistic enough to put it into practice, forgiveness is only confined in the hymn, in a spiritual domain in which people praise and celebrate. This kind of suggestion is related to what Kristeva says about forgiveness remaining in a private sphere: “This can only be done in strict privacy, notably that of the analytic cure” because “[t]he social sphere . . . is that of judgment” (Kristeva Forgiveness 282). “There is a public discourse, and it must be continued as a discourse of condemnation, of settling accounts” (Kristeva Forgiveness 283), as I said it is the must-do for the benefits of the rule to be set. “The social sphere is the sphere of history; there is past, a present, and a future. In that field, forgiveness must simply follow judgment and condemnation” (Kristeva Forgiveness 285). When it comes to judgment, perpetrators are guilty without doubt. “One can arrive at comprehending the criminal, but one cannot absolve him. Fault in its essence is unforgivable not only in fact but by right” (Ricoeur 466). Thus, in the social sphere, forgiveness is being suspended instead.