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Derrida’s reflections are centrally concerned with questioning the (im)morality of forgiveness, the fear that forgiving may lead to forgetting, the reciprocity of forgiveness asked for and forgiveness granted, and he seeks to find a way to think together forgiveness and reparation, the law and punishment.

The conclusion discusses revenge and forgiveness as fraught problems. Carl Schmitt’s binary of friend/enemy is of import here, as is Vladimir Jankélévitch’s work on the pardon. The conclusion also considers the importance of Romanticism to the Nazis, drawing on “De l'Allemagne, 1800-1938,” a problematic exhibition of German thought and painting sponsored by the French and German governments at the Louvre in 2013. The conclusion asks to what extent a museum exhibit or a painting might provide a way of bypassing horror. Can we bear witness to the suffering of others? How is it that memory and amnesia can work in tandem? To what extent is the targeting of civilians, sworn enemies, acceptable? The book ends with questions that have no obvious answers.

Chapter 3 explores the principal theme of Jankélévitch’s philosophy of music: a fidelity to music’s inconsistency based in the a priori rejection of any kind of Versprachlichung (Wittgenstinian, Adornian, or otherwise). That is, if Bloch’s and Adorno’s conceptions of music’s ineffability were based in its vague shadowing of linguistic structure, Jankélévitch’s is based in its qualitative refusal of it. The first half of chapter 3 links Jankélévitch’s views of music with his enduring philosophical commitments: to Bergson, to the aporetic experience of the vanishing now, to key aspects of his moral philosophy, and to the metaphysical dynamism of the instant. The second half explains how Jankélévitch develops what I call a “speculative multiplicity” of philosophies of music that are united by their deliberate refusal of any kind of language-like character in music. It concludes by arguing that Jankélévitch’s philosophy is best described not as “antidialectical” but rather as practicing an “unwoven” dialectic that retains an attentive ethics to musical forms while dramatically slackening the criteria one would use to specify them.

The book begins by looking at the arguments made by Holocaust survivors (such as Ruth Kluger, Simon Wiesenthal, and Primo Levi) for the impossibility of forgiveness beyond any subjective volition. As the drive towards closure and normalization, forgiveness has been interpreted, particularly since World War II, to be the enemy of justice. Against this background, Eva Mozes Kor’s Forgiving Doctor Mengele argues on the contrary that forgiveness is a means of self-empowerment of the individual. Through forgiveness, the individual can heal themselves from the traumas of the past. The introduction puts forward the thesis that what Eva Mozes Kor calls forgiveness is in fact not forgiveness, but a therapy of mourning in the name of forgiveness. What forgiveness is in relation to the Holocaust must be thought otherwise. It should be determined in relation to what Vladimir Jankélévitch calls the “inexpiable” character of Nazi crimes, i.e., a sphere foreign to any form of reconciliation, mediation, reparation, salvation, normalization, mourning, healing, apology, or excuse. If the value of forgiveness is not to be the philosophical and religious ally of the Nazi Final Solution, then it must be thought as irreducible to any pre-given finality or achieved normalization.

Jacques Derrida's writings on forgiveness, dating from the 1990s, draw on Vladimir Jankélévitch's efforts to discern the paradoxical conditions for forgiveness. I seek to understand Derrida's treatment of Jankélévitch and forgiveness by recalling the 1963 Colloque des intellectuels juifs de langue française, at which Jankélévitch delivered one of his key texts on forgiveness, and also the venue for Levinas's well-known Talmudic reading on forgiveness, “Toward the Other.” Looking at “Avowing—The Impossible” in the present volume, which originated as Derrida's address to the 1998 Colloque, reveals how his understanding of forgiveness is linked to his philosophical relationship to Levinas, and to both thinkers’ interrogations of being-Jewish in terms of election and universal responsibility.

Debussy’s early setting of Mallarmé’s ‘Apparition’ provides the focus for an exploration of the way music stages the process of appearing and coming to presence. The foregrounding of this, over any idea of narrative or drama, is traced in La damoiselle élue, the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, Pelléas et Mélisande, La mer, Jeux – works whose central concern is the play of appearing and disappearing. This category is explored theoretically through the work of Jankélévitch, Martin Seel, and Derrida. Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence is central here, as is a consideration of Mallarmé’s discussion of the dancer Loïe Fuller. The idea of an evanescent music is thematised in the ‘fairy’ creatures of Debussy’s piano preludes, a kind of fictional embodiment of Mallarmé’s idea of poetry as a ‘dispersion volatile’.

Heidegger’s idea of thrownness towards death suggests that our ultimate fate is oblivion. Can this be countered, without invoking questionable metaphysical ideas of timelessness? Starting with the experience of time as ceaseless futurition, Vladimir Jankélevitch argues that memory, especially the memory enshrined in musical souvenirs, offers some consolation, whilst suggesting that the passing of time undo the having-been of, e.g. the nameless child annihilated in the Nazi death-camp. J.-L. Chrétien sees time-experience itself as pointing towards an immemorial past and an unhoped-for future—hinted at perhaps in the mystical poetry of John of the Cross. Emmanuel Lévinas, however, argues for a more thoroughly social hope, a kind of Messianism in which time acquires meaning through ethical engagement on behalf of the orphan, widow, and stranger. The Brothers Karamazov is read as pointing to apocalyptic time, outside the order of historical time but offering solace and hope to those within it.

This chapter argues that some postmodern philosophers of forgiveness—especially John Milbank, Jacques Derrida, and Vladimir Jankélévitch—develop a restrictive model of what forgiveness is and argue that it is therefore “impossible” because they implicitly draw on a Pauline conception of forgiveness. In the Pauline model, the forgiveness humans extend to each other is modeled on the kind of forgiveness that a divine being can give to a fallen humanity. Milbank, Derrida, and Jankélévitch suggest that it is what forgiveness is, that it is the only practice that can be called forgiveness, and any less “pure” form of forgiveness just isn’t forgiveness. This chapter demonstrates the problem with such mystical and sceptical conceptions of the moral practice of interpersonal forgiveness.

Even if we can envisage the social forms that a Kingdom of Love might require, is such a kingdom a pure ideal? Can love become a reality in a world such as ours, where even love itself is a source of human suffering and mutual affliction? Kant postulates an archetypal life of love that is humanly imaginable, but it seems it would take a near-miracle to realize the ideal. This is the miracle Christian theologians such as Karl Barth see in Christmas. The Christmas event, Barth argues is incomprehensible to human reason and we can only bear witness to it. Against this view, it is argued that the new beginning that Christians see in the Incarnation coheres with human experience, as in the ‘novelty’ of a new birth and the possibility of forgiveness. Yet, as the Christian Eucharist shows, this new beginning in history remains also a focus of eschatological hope.