Abstract

Derrida's recent book, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, offers a succinct and elegant understanding of forgiveness as ‘impossibility’, unencumbered by any conditions or threats of instrumentalization. However it also contains a disturbing implication. The first part of this article discusses the theory at length, followed by a series of critiques in the second part that shows how his aporetic theory of forgiveness is morally dangerous, for it unwittingly rests upon erasing the memory of the transcendental shortcomings of his conception. The article goes on to outline an alternative theory of forgiveness