A Question of Forgiving words

Summary

[T]he smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation. Hannah Arendt

To save time, just ask unanswerable questions. Jacques Derrida

SPEAKING, TO A QUESTION

What if the question remains? Amidst all the public discussion of forgiveness, there is the question of the inquiry with which it begins, the question that appears in the name of beginning anew – Will you forgive me? Charged if not loaded, the very sound of this question resonates. Asked in time, it strikes us as an opening, a moment of potential given to (re)turning history from fate. Posed in the wake of that which changes everything, however, the inquiry smacks of contrivance, an artifice that recalls if not (re)inflicts a hollowing wound. Between a gesture of redress and an unthinking affront…this variation is telling. Addressed to a subject that has suffered a particular wrong, a transgression whose precise depth may touch the very limit of articulation and defy complete knowledge, the question of forgiveness is never quite the same even if its grammar is altogether familiar. Its inquiry composes a unique imposition, a posing with (dis)respect to an event, a posture that makes reference even as it has neither the comprehension nor the standing needed to refer to that which it addresses. Before a reply, the captivating problem of whether forgiveness is permissible and perhaps even desirable, there is then the matter of hearing the question, of listening to what it renders questionable. Without promise, the question of forgiveness arrives already divided, an inquiry caught between its own expression and its query as to what remains (in)expressible. A speech act that troubles the action of speaking – in public and perhaps for publicity's sake – the question of forgiveness asks after the (im)potentiality of (its) speak-ability and inquires into our experience of (its) language.

In how many ways does the (un)speakable haunt the question of forgiveness? We do not always remember – we may not be able to remember – that the question appears in the aftermath, a moment in which the capacity to ask and the capacity to answer are not given.