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is incapable of forgiveness, of escaping from the friend-enemy relationship. (p. 476-477)And there are no doubt things that are not so decided, and on which coercion has no hold.To understand this point properly, it is important to note Ricoeur’s extreme distrustwith respect to love, and more precisely with respect to all premature synthesis betweenreligious ethics of reconciliation or even merely of the compassionate agape, and theethics of the magistrate. If there is no politics of forgiveness, it is because love “provesto be foreign to the world and, for this reason, not only apolitical but antipolitical.” (p.488) Ricoeur, as always by another path, converges here with Hannah Arendt, in thisdistrust regarding compassion that does not leave any room for debate, distance, plurality,for conflict itself -- and therefore for its rules. On the other hand, neither is it aboutbringing back all unity in history or justice under the sign of synthesis; it is precisely thatthere are different forms of impartiality, there is no absolute third, as if it were soimportant to allow room for an antipolitical fringe. The gap is irreducible, and perhaps itis this anachronism that makes time human.I would guess, and this is what I would like to explore in the pages that come, that theword parerga, parergon, can help us to think through the ambiguous position of forgivenessand love in the epilogue. An epilogue is not a conclusion. Ricoeur speaks of incompleteness.I will add that it is less about a step in the same direction or a reconnection thatenables a consolidation of all that has been achieved along the way, than of a kind of “detotalization,”of a return to the beginning -- but of course then, one does not begin againin the same way. The term of parerga is used by Kant in the final note that completes thefirst of the four general remarks that finishes the four parts of The Religion within theLimits of Reason Alone. These four remarks are about grace, understood as that which isconfined to religion, and give it its frame but would not know how to become an integralpart of it. The inactivity of grace must remain an outside limit to religion. In the sameway, it seems to me that Ricoeur places his epilogue under the title of forgiveness (andof an economy of the gift and the loss), to situate it on this margin that is neither insidenor outside.In a small book on the ethics of Ricoeur, 11 I myself slipped in an epilogue on “Loveand Justice” where I tried to show this ambiguity, the living tension, the twist he puts onthe golden rule (not to do unto others what one would not want done to oneself).Sometimes it works like an old promise that constantly reopens the rules of proceduraljustice:détachée du contexte de la règle d’or, la règle du maximin resterait un argumentpurement prudentiel, caractéristique de tout jeu de marchandage. Non seulement lavisée déontologique, mais même la dimension historique du sens de la justice, ne sontpas simplement intuitives, mais résultent d’une longue Bildung issue de la traditionjuive et chrétienne, aussi bien que grecque et romaine. Séparée de cette histoireculturelle, la règle du maximin perdrait sa caractérisation éthique. 12Sometimes a principle of justice and reciprocity is formulated that, separated from love,becomes perverse in its turn. It is no doubt why the just can sometimes understand theopposition of the legal and the good, and sometimes be opposed to the good that wouldthen point toward infinite love. Love then exceeds all justice in all ways:11Olivier Abel, Paul Ricoeur, la promesse et la règle (Paris: Michalon, 1996).12“Une théorie purement procédurale de la justice est-elle possible?” Paul Ricoeur, Le juste (Paris:Esprit, 1995), 96.103