[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but inorder to begin”? In this respect, “action… looks like a miracle. (p. 246)The evocation of the miracle of action, at the origin of the miracle of forgiveness,seriously calls into question the entire analysis of the faculty of forgiveness. How can themastery of time be joined to the miracle of natality? It is precisely this question that setsour entire enterprise into motion again and invites us to pursue the odyssey of forgivenessto the center of selfhood. In my opinion, what is lacking in the political interpretation offorgiveness, which assures its symmetry with promising on the same level of exchange,is any reflection on the very active binding proposed as the condition for the act ofbinding.” (p. 636)7. The Faculty of UnbindingForgiveness introduces at once a link, a bond of debt and mourning, and an unbinding,a rupture, the faculty to start over. 22 It is why there is no need to raise the birth to thepoint of making it a triumph of life, like an unending process of renewal, which wouldcompletely lack the tragic. 23 The theme of birth appears since Le volontaire etl’involontaire as even more radical than that of death, and comprised at the same time ofthe vigorous joy in the new, and of mourning. Birth is also orphaned, it is a necessaryfacet of all experience, a fundamental limit. And I would quickly point out that the lastpages of Memory, History, Forgetting, which foreground the undecidable character of thepolarity that divides forgetting between the grief-stricken entropy of erasure and the joyfulconfidence in that which he calls the forgetting in reserve, brings this equivocation to itsparoxysm.If we give credit to the competence of ordinary beings in the face of time, we will notthen think of mourning without thinking of birth, that is to say the desire to be -- it is herethat the Bergsonianism probably conceals a discreet Spinozism, a deeply affirmativeorientation, approving of the thought of Paul Ricoeur, who ends his book on the notionof life, of incompleteness. But this living continuity that one recovers with the astonishingidea of a forgetting in reserve that he opposes to the forgetting of erasure, to thediscontinuity of deaths and births, as being of the same strength, does not designatesomething that would be at our disposal (otherwise this would not be of the order offorgetting), but something that arranges us. Moreover: in this respect, there is norepresentation of the past that could be a resurrection of it, that would no doubt requirea finished work of memory (p. 499) -- mourning is there to separate the past from thepresent and to make room for the future, that is to say for being carefree, for forgettingoneself. Whence comes the final Kierkegaardian note.It is indeed a point where one can speak of a stilled forgetting, (oubli d vr) andRicoeur then cites the magnificent pages of Kierkegaard on the lilies of the field and thebirds of the sky, who do not work, do not compare, who forget themselves. Thisinsouciance, this unbinding of the care of self, is again a theme of the forgiveness, not22This unbinding is a completely primary metapolitical theme, hearkening back to the PuritanReformation, on the right of breaking alliances and contracts. At the same time it is a comic theme, atheme of wisdom: thus Ricoeur develops elsewhere more tragic and epic theses, which do not allow usas easily to think the binding of the agent and his act that Badiou attributes to Ricoeur as a Christianconception of the subject. Since then I have explained this in an article appearing in the Herne journals.23This would also be a mistaken reading of Hannah Arendt.107