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only as a place made for oneself as another, but also as an erasing of oneself beforeanother, and who comes to be, to appear in world.It is exactly because there is the melancholy, the very impossibility of completing thetask of mourning, that there is birth that neither finishes nor supplements this work, butstills it. The difficulty of forgiveness is to yield neither to the vertigo of entropy, the wearof forgetting, the habituation that relativizes all and by which all returns to indifference 24 ;nor to yield to the prestige of negentropy, of this negative entropy by which memorywould wish to be able to reclaim everything, to sort out and calculate with no remainder,in a total recollection and redemption of the past in its entirety. 25 It is to the point thatit seems to me possible to drive the idea, that the epilogue on forgiveness in parergon ofMemory, History, Forgetting, is a limit, a paradox, a horizon, the place of tension, oftorsion or the about-face of all discourses.Ricoeur’s epilogue puts forgiveness on a limit, a notion that is made very Kantian --in the sense of the question: “What am I permitted to hope?” To take the philosophicalapproximation of the theological vocabulary of Religion Within the Limits of ReasonAlone, we could say with Ricoeur that: “forgiveness offers itself as the best eschatologicalhorizon of the entire problematic of memory, history, and forgetting.” Would forgivenessfinally be like the eschatological horizon of the appeased memory, of the happyforgetting? But this must immediately be understood as a limit idea, which is why Ricoeurcontinues: “But this approximation of eskhaton guarantees no happy ending for ourenterprise as a whole: this is why it will be question only of a difficult forgiveness(epilogue).” (p. 285) It is just why it is necessary “to examine it and side of the text, soto speak, in the form of an epilogue.” (p. 285)This horizon is less defined as a fusion of horizons in Gadamer’s sense than as a flight(fuite) of horizons, and an incompleteness. (p. 538) The eskhaton is not the LastJudgment, which Ricoeur greatly mistrusts (it is for him a contradictory notion, and eventhen there is no absolute third). And the odyssey of forgiveness ever reaches the promisedland. It is that which Ricoeur shows in his magnificent reading of hope in Kant. 26To really grasp this point, I would say that Ricoeur does not conceive of forgivenessat all as the crowning or teleological reconciliation of history, but as an eskhaton, aconstituent limit, and I would almost call it an ordinary condition. 27 And it is why in my24It is the sense of the protest of Jankélévitch but also of Nietzsche’s criticism of Schopenhaueriandetachment.25It is by this double movement, no doubt also influenced by a reading of a great essay by Jean-François Lyotard on Hannah Arendt (entitled Survivant, in his Lectures d’enfance), that I achieved my“Tables de Pardon,” in the appendix to Le Pardon, briser la dette et l’oubli (Paris: Autrement, 1992).26There he asks: “ajouter à l’objet de sa visée, pour qu’il soit entier, ce qu’elle a exclu de sonprincipe, pour qu’il soit pur.” And radical evil “n’aît sur la voie de la totalisation, il n’apparaît que dansune pathologie de l’espérance, comme la perversion inhérente à la problématique de l’accomplissementet de la totalisation.” See Paul Ricoeur, “La liberté selon l’espérance,” in idem, Le Conflit desinterprétations (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 407, 414.27Grace does not come as the crowning moment of nature or history, it precedes them as a firstunbinding, a recommencement, a first gift, a free giving, an offer where forgiveness is but gratitude andrecognition. It is why, during a 1996 course I gave in Lausanne on “Le pardon, l’histoire, l’oubli,” Iadopted this alternate syntax (also used in my Esprit article in 1993: “Ce que le pardon vient faire dansl’Histoire”). Starting from an unconditional and impossible forgiveness, passing by way of the pragmaticsof conditional forgiveness, I then moved toward an anthropology of a necessary forgiveness. It is this firstforgiveness that I then confronted with two kinds of tragedy, the tragedy of conflict with respect todisagreements in history, and the formidable work of emplotment they require. The tragedy of theirreparable with respect to the double work of memory and forgetting culminated in moderate praise forforgetting.108