Peter Banki

The Forgiveness to Come: Dreams and Aporias

Book Proposal for University Press
Title: The Forgiveness to Come: Dreams and Aporias
Author: Peter Banki
Contact Address: 12/20 Hardy Street,
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New South Wales, 2026.
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email: pjb239@nyu.edu

Description of the Monograph
Reading the debate on forgiveness in the literature of Holocaust survivors will help to
read and understand the necessity of Derridas intervention. You are writing to those
people who want to understanding Derridas thinking? Applying Derridas thinking to
a reading of these texts. If it is read well, this thinking can open new perspectives for
understanding them.
Its not just about the Holocaust where to situate the Holocaust?
One starting point: it is about the Holocaust, the Holocaust the inspiration, but on the
other hand he doesnt need it.

There is a responsibility for the memory of the Holocaustand the memory also
implies a thinking, an on-going thinking. We need to find new ways to memorialize
the Holocaustin order to avoid the resentment, the burn-out, the comparison with
other crimes, etc. The question of forgiveness also gives this possibilityof a
different angle or perspective.
The other starting point: this was an impermissible question for me. Whats your
personal relationship to the Holocaust? If you forgive it, then you make it possible to
happen again. Everything comes into this, learning German literature, learning
German, the whole relationship to Europe, everything comes into this.
If you dont forgive, you dont read, you dont open, or expose yourself. This whole
issue of trust. Its bigits big.
The central debates in the Holocaust literature about forgiveness are not specific to
this literature. These debates about mourning and responsibility. You dont need to
refer to it, but on the other hand, you do. Perhaps. It is helpful and instructive.
Peter Banki
The Forgiveness to Come: Dreams and Aporias
Getting Triggered by Derrida: there is something taboo-breaking here: make the
holocaust of post-cards and love letters. Using words that are valid for the Holocaust
in general ways. I don't think one has the right to suspect or forbid anyone the use of
these words because these words are valid par excellence for designating the Shoah.
And I believe that, on the contrary, out of respect for the Shoah, it is a way of re-
thinking ethics, politics, philosophical discourse on the basis of categories that seem
to us most appropriate to the Shoah. A certain way of respecting the Shoah.
I also believed that Derrida wanted and needed forgiveness in his life. The sacrifice of
Abrahambecause he had this sense of a hyper-responsibility. Forgiveness is a
necessary corollary of the exigency to do or make the impossible.
The question of forgiveness in a hidden way is there in the reading as the reading
of so many very important contemporary texts: Heidegger, Blanchot, de Man,
Schmitt, etc. It is something that he would have had to grapple with a lot. Do we
forgive them? Do we read them? Conscious of their faults. Couldnt read them
unconsciously of their faults. If we dont forgive them, we dont read them.
You can read Heidegger without forgiving him, but then you wouldnt be reading him
in the way he asks to be read. Which is to be precisely overturned by the thought.
It is not a non-question. Or rather it is a non-question, but in another way. Derridas
thought opens the perspective of this reading - reading as unconditional forgiveness
and the request for unconditional forgiveness. Does the question of forgiveness have a
place? Yes and no. There is no place for this question. It is a non-question. I dont
believe in forgiveness. Hartmann and Hamacher. I trusted in Derrida more.

The monograph, To Forgive the Unforgivable: Dreams and Aporias, addresses the
difficulties posed by the Holocaust for a thinking of forgiveness inherited from the
Abrahamic (i.e. monotheistic) tradition. As a way to approach these difficulties, I
explore the often radically divergent positions in the debate on forgiveness in the
literature of Holocaust survivors. Forgiveness is sometimes understood as a means of
self-empowerment (Eva Mozes Kor); part of the inevitable process of historical
normalization and amnesia (Jean Amry); or otherwise as an unresolved question, that
will survive all trials and remain contemporary when the crimes of the Nazis belong
to the distant past (Simon Wiesenthal).
Why does the value of forgiveness impose itself in the literature of the Holocaust?
What does this imposition reveal about Western culture, dominated by Judeo-
Christian traditions? Recent studies (Lang 2000, Langer 2000, Weigel 2002) have
argued for the necessity, in the light of the Holocaust, to rethink what forgiveness is,
the conditions under which it supposedly takes place, and in particular its relation to
justice. What the philosopher Vladimir Janklvitch has termed the inexpiable
character of Nazi crimes need not necessarily imply what he called the death of
forgiveness. However, the inexpiable compels us to re-think the habitual
understanding of forgiveness as a human possibility or power, moreover, one that
must be the correlate of punishment (Arendt 1958).
On the basis of Jacques Derridas recent work on the subject, I undertake close
readings of Simon Wiesenthals Die Sonnenblume (1969), Jean Amrys Jenseits von
Peter Banki
The Forgiveness to Come: Dreams and Aporias
Schuld und Shne (1966), Vladimir Janklvitchs Le Pardon (1967) and Robert
Antelmes Lespce humaine (1947). In addition, I analyse the documentary film
Forgiving Doctor Mengele (2006) on Eva Mozes Kor. Each of these works bears
witness to aporias, or unsolvable impasses, of forgiveness, justice and responsibility
in relation to the Holocaust. Might forgiveness be something other than what until
now has been thought or recognized under this name? Can one imagine a forgiveness
without power, that would be unconditional but without sovereignty?

Length of Book: 50,000 words
Expected Completion Date of Volume: December 2012
Market:
Annotated Contents of the Proposed Monograph
Competition:
Information about the author
Suggested Readers

What has to go into it? Well, I have to look it up.
Lacuna in the academic debate, administrative document, prospectus, suggested
readers. Illinois, Fordham, Continuim, Paul Graves, Polgray, Tom. Jewish studies,
Deconstruction, etc.

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