by one’s guest, diverts him from a more realistic study of how
we are actually bound together in social life. As psyches, and as
citizens, we continue to evaluate one another. And such evalu-
ation cannot be separated from our sense of what dealing
justly means.
Derrida argues in his hospitality course, as he does in his
Cardozo lecture and his 1998 speeches in South Africa about
the aftermath of apartheid, that only what is unforgivable
can truly be forgiven: precisely because it is impossible to for-
give the unforgivable, and because it is in such impossibility
that real forgiveness consists. True justice necessarily takes
such paradoxical form—if it can be said to exist at all. “For-
giveness must therefore do the impossible,” Derrida intones. “It
must undergo the test and ordeal of its own impossibility in
forgiving the unforgivable... the possibility, if it is possible
and if there is such, the possibility ofthe impossible. And the
impossible of the possible” ( 386 ). (In South Africa, Derrida
went so far as to suggest that forgetting, rather than remem-
brance, ought to be the point of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission.) Ironically, Derrida the great opponent of meta-
physics constructs a sublimely metaphysical ideal of justice.
Such abstraction required a countermovement, a return
to concrete issues. In 2001 , a book of conversations between
Derrida and the psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco was pub-
lished under the title For What Tomorrow... A Dialogue.In
this book, Derrida continues his aggressive program of “get-
ting political,” delivering statements on pressing questions in-
cluding capital punishment, racism and anti-Semitism, and
the future of Europe. (Interestingly, Derrida, while condemn-
ing executions in the United States, takes no notice of the more
widespread use of capital punishment in China. In the last few
years of his life Derrida received several doctorates from Chi-
Politics, Marx, Judaism 233