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From where, perhaps, the place of the forgiveness to stop the increase of useless words,to start again by grounding ourselves anew in the possibility of speech:Forgiveness raises a question that in its principle is distinct from the one that...hasmotivated our entire undertaking... On the one hand, it is the enigma of a fault held toparalyze the empowerment to act of the “capable being” that “we are”; and it is, inreply, the enigma of the possible lifting of this existential incapacity, designated by theterm “forgiveness.” This double enigma runs diagonally through that of therepresentation of the past. (p. 457)5. The Horizon of ForgivenessCan we make a last step toward our topic without this, turning suddenly toward us,sending us back to the gate, forcing us to start again on a different path? We are goingto come back to the point where we were while going off in quite a different direction,and this will be our second digression. The place granted to difficult forgiveness in theepilogue of Memory, History, Forgetting, touches very near to some very old concerns ofmine, and I am very sensitive to the remarkable ambiguousness in which Ricoeur placesforgiveness, because he situates it well inside his book as something that comes downfrom its unconditional height to move across the set of institutions (legal imprescriptibility,citizenship of historical responsibility) and exchanges (restoration of a possible reciprocity)before coming back to that which I called the negative recognition of the release: an orderto be bound by a promise, the subject of an action must also be able to be released fromit through forgiveness. (p. 459) In this difficult moment, forgiveness must pass throughthe test of justice, not short-circuit it, (p. 473) and Ricoeur speaks of the conditionality ofthe demand of forgiveness, against the unconditionality of a forgiveness granted.But at exactly the same time, he speaks of forgiveness as an exceptional, unconditional,extraordinary, impossible act, because it is addressed to the unforgivable. (p. 471f) Hespeaks of gestures incapable of being transformed into institutions (p. 458), and he speaksof abuses of forgiveness just as there are abuses of memory. (p.469) The link between tothe book’s epilogue is then very uncertain, like a supplement where one does not knowif and how it is connected to the rest: Ricoeur announces immediately that it is a questionother than the one of representing the past that motivated the book as a whole: ifforgiveness gives shape of the epilogue, it is rather like a figure of tragic wisdom or like:an eschatology of the representation of the past. Forgiveness, if it has a sense, and if itexists, constitutes the horizon common to memory, history and forgetting. Always in retreat,this horizon slips away from my grasp. It makes forgiving difficult: not easy butnot impossible. It places a seal of incompleteness on the entire enterprise. (p. 593 10 )Ricoeur declared earlier in the text that it was necessary to place forgiveness “outside ofthe text.” In the optics of the book, the depth of “fault belongs to the parerga, the‘asides,’” (p. 461) like all limit situations he addresses in the epilogue. We might objectthat if it is no longer about the major question of the representation of the absent past, weare nevertheless involved in the other big question, the one of a just politics of memoryand forgetting. But Ricoeur challenges the idea of a politics of forgiveness: the collective10See also p. 646. Ricoeur is speaking of the horizon of accomplishment of a historical knowledgethat is aware of its own limits.102