Forgiveness: A Quiet Assault on the Malicious

Steve Larocco

Forgiveness is the self’s quiet assault on the power of the malicious and the injurious. Its aim is to repair or mitigate the breaches and fractures the malicious and the injurious create within the self, between the self and other(s), and across the social order. It does this in two ways: publicly, as a ritualised speech-act, wherein forgiveness forges a special form of recognition, in which recognition of oneself as one who forgives stands in for and displaces various forms of non-recognition by the other(s); and privately, as a form of affective reattunement, in which a ‘decathexis’ of the breach wrought by the malicious releases the self from an imposed shame and facilitates the reassertion of a self which has affirmatively assimilated injury, a process necessary for its release. For forgiveness to be fully functional, it needs to operate both publicly and privately, both as a ritual speech-act and as a manifestation of affective reattunement. Publicly, it needs to operate as a ritual and not as a transaction, because forgiveness, unlike a transaction, can neither require nor demand reciprocity. As Paul Ricoeur might have said, forgiveness, as public ritual is a form of imputation, a way of holding the other accountable, yet it still must be able to function under conditions of non-reciprocity. Forgiveness always operates in the ineluctable possibility of its repudiation by the other. It functions as a ritual affirmation that itself refuses to recognize the other’s power of negation; as ritualised speech-act, it imposes its own version of things on the other beyond the other’s power of negation, something a transaction, enmeshed in the logic of exchange, cannot achieve. Public rituals of forgiveness, in spite of this structural nonreciprocity, hold the other accountable even in the act of releasement of that accountability, a releasement that, ephemerally, negates the ongoing force that the malicious or injurious purports to have. It does this in two ways: first, by verbally taking on and naming what is not one’s own – the other’s malevolence, indifference or harm – and releasing the self socially from the stigmatising traces of those capacities; and, second, by speaking into being a version of self and a form of social dignity that negates and survives the malicious. Privately, forgiveness involves affective reattunement, which begins with a decathexis of the breach in self-wrought by the malicious or the injurious. This entails an affective releasing of the psychic wound whose splitting force has generated a new, fractured identity-possibility for the self. While the breach may well be stigmatised psychically, in order for forgiveness to occur the self that has become simultaneously fractured and organized by an injurious breach must destigmatise that breach; that is, the self must withdraw investments in the identity possibilities constituted by psychic injury and the rectitude that transforms such injury into victimhood and identity formation. This involves the self’s assimilation and release of the shame wrought by injury and malice. And this assimilation is itself a negation of the power of the malicious, a form of non-recognition that negates. Forgiveness, then, in its twofold structure – as public ritual and speech-act, and as affective reattunement – enables the self to generate an event and a condition of being that, at least ephemerally, negates much of the retroactive and ongoing force of the malicious and the injurious.

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Forgiveness: A Quiet Assault on the Malicious

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Forgiveness in Perspective

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Forgiveness: A Quiet Assault on the Malicious

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Forgiveness in Perspective

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