marius timmann mjaalandyou, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.” The presupposition
for such forgiveness is that there is Another who may forgive, or rather,
that every sin and guilt one may be responsible for in face of the Other
concerns that Other as much as it concerns me. But who is able to say
“I forgive,” who is entitled to speak these words?
In the second session of “Hospitality” Derrida discusses the problem
of asking for forgiveness even for one’s Being-there [être-la] and
concludes that no one is entitled to forgive unless he is able to become
a subject, not as “subjectum” or “substantia” in the classical sense, but
as a subjection to the law that is above him: “this is indeed submission,
subjection, sub-jection of one who is who he is only insofar as he asks
for the forgiveness of the other.”^27 Derrida takes this original grounding
or constitution of the subject back to a “cogito” even prior to the
Cartesian cogito: “as soon as I say I, even in solitude, as soon as I say
ego cogito, I am in the process of asking for forgiveness or being forgiven,
at least if the experience lasts for more than an instant and temporalizes
itself.”^28
What may seem surprising is that Derrida ascribes an ontological
significance to such an “event” of forgiveness. Quoting an early text
of Levinas, he discusses how this ontological event of everything that
is being, such as “being forgiven” or “being there,” receives its onto-
logical qualification by breaking with traditional ontology, inscribing
the “I” in a leap into a temporalized structure where the Self is rede-
fined by its relation to the Other.^29 Formulating this being temporally
as “being-there” interrupts and redefines the task of ontology, as
Derrida does in this late text.
In Kierkegaard, the possibility of forgiveness becomes similarly
significant considering the diagnosis of the sickness in the Self — i.e.,
- Derrida, ”Hospitality,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, London: Routledge,
2002, 388. - Derrida, ”Hospitality,” 391. Derrida, ”Hospitality,” 391.
- “Reaching the other is not something justified by itself; it is not a matter of
shaking me out of my boredom. It is, on the ontological level, the event of the
most radical breakup of the very categories of the ego, for it is for me to some-
where else than my self; it is to be pardoned, not to be a definite existence.” Derrida
quoting Emmanuel Levinas from De l’existence à l’existant (Paris: Vrin, 1990), 144
(emphasis added) in ”Hospitality,” 391.