Forgiveness, Gift Theory and the Play of Impurity and Inequity

Steve Larocco

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Forgiveness, Gift Theory and the Play of Impurity and Inequity

In: Forgiveness: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

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Steve Larocco

Steve Larocco
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Pages:: 29–36

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848880832_005

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Forgiveness has become, in current theory, a symptom of a fundamental ambivalence in social order: are social relations founded on necessary reciprocity, in which social expenditures and debts require responses that restore equity or balance (what one might call justice)? Or are social relations founded on ‘pure moral relations,’ that is, relations in which a donation of some kind to the other prompts or prescribes no need of response or reciprocation? Marcel Henaff, in The Price of Truth, traces this rift to a transition from societies based on ceremonial gift exchange (in which gifts are performative acts of recognition) to societies in which central political organization has vastly lessened the need for ceremonial exchange, and in which ‘pure’ gift-giving, the attempt to advance the welfare of the other through a gift that expects no return, has come to dominate. These structures of gift-giving provide some of the substructures of forgiveness, which can be conceptualized metaphorically as a gift in response to offense. Socially, an offense disrupts social equilibrium and equity, creating an asymmetry or imbalance. This mishap creates individual or collective social debt. Theories of bilateral forgiveness see such debt as enmeshed in a structure of equity based on restored reciprocity—I will forgive you if you give me the gift of regret and apology. In contrast, theories of unilateral or ‘pure’ forgiveness assume no structure of equity, considering forgiveness as a kind of extravagant generosity, a delivery of social grace without encumbrance. Forgiveness, however, in our postmodern world, is structured by the simultaneous pressures of reciprocity and debt on the one hand, and charity and extravagance on the other. Due to this inevitably dual structure, forgiveness remains fundamentally ambivalent, riven between impurity and justice and inequity and grace.

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Forgiveness: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

E-Book ISBN:: 9781848880832

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 29 Apr 2011

Subjects
- Social Sciences
  - Comparative Social Sciences
  - Cultural Studies

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Forgiveness, Gift Theory and the Play of Impurity and Inequity

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Forgiveness: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue

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