Forgetfulness of Accusation | Matthew Unger

2016. Unger, Matthew P. “The Forgetfulness of Accusation.” In Accusation: Creating

Criminals. George Pavlich and Matthew P. Unger, Eds. UBC Press.

CHAPTER 7: THE FORGETFULNESS OF ACCUSATION

Matthew P. Unger

Concordia University, Montreal

We are, none of us, beyond reproach. This is one lesson that we can take from Albert Camus’s
(1991a) The Fall. This difficult, short novel is about a Parisian expatriate living in
Amsterdam, and consists of a dialogue between him and an anonymous, silent interlocutor.
The main character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, issues a surprising confession early in the
novel, revealing that he is a judge-penitent, a paradoxical status that he takes the length of
the novel to fully elaborate. He inaugurates his “profession,” as he calls it, as judge-penitent
after the veil of his own duplicitous, ambivalent, and inherently equivocal experience has
been lifted from his previously “innocent,” successful, insouciant, principled life – or his life
before accusation. In this chapter I will explore accusation through the character of Jean-
Baptiste. By drawing from Ricoeur’s (1974a) texts on the symbolism of accusation and
punishment, and from Emmanuel Levinas’s (1998) Otherwise Than Being, we are able to
read the ambivalence of accusation that Jean-Baptiste experiences. It is my contention that
there is a moment where a choice is revealed to him – to recognize the inherent responsibility
to others through self-accusation or to absolve himself of this obligation by deferring
accusation onto others.

This novel is rich in symbolism and irony. The painting that Jean-Baptiste references in the
final chapter of the novel, The Just Judges, and the larger Ghent Altarpiece of which it is a
part, have been understood by some scholars to be a significant symbol, even a sardonic,
inverted, and flattened analogue to Jean-Baptiste. Similarly, Jean-Baptiste has been
understood to be an inverted John the Baptist, a prophet for an age without metaphysics. By
situating Jean-Baptiste in a seedy bar called Mexico City in the centre of the red-light
district in Amsterdam, calling all he meets to witness their inherent ubiquitous guilt, Camus
is creating a clear sardonic analogy to John the Baptist, who, as is shown in the book of
Luke, also came from a privileged background but chose to live a life of penance in the
wilderness, calling all others to do the same. This analogy, in my reading, situates themes
within modern conditions of accusation as a logical, and secularized, culmination of the
Judeo-Christian myth of accusation. This symbolic heritage that Camus implicates is a
complex narrative trope that discloses the ethical significance in the distinction between
accusation and self-accusation that I will endeavour to explore.

In this chapter, I argue that this historical lineage of accusation, following Levinas and
Ricoeur, allows a critical examination of accusation as a form of forgetfulness, a kind of social
estrangement, from the more ethical and foundational category of self-accusation. That is, by
revealing the mythological, socially discursive, and contingent nature of criminal accusation,
juridical accusation divulges a solipsistic sundering of the other in its apprehension.
Accusation tends to be directed to individual subjects, thereby forgetting the collective other

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from which any accusation derives. However, in reading the irony of Camus through Levinas
and Ricoeur, we can see two levels of accusation – the naïve pre-critical experience of a
violent framing of the individual, which distances us from a more fundamental level that
exposes the ethical comportment of our social being. Indeed, Levinas suggests that it is a
particular kind of accusation that in fact situates us in the social and creates the conditions
of possibilities for something like a unique subject to even exist – for a social institution to
destroy that is a form of forgetfulness. In this chapter, I explore how self-accusation can
provide the capacity to reclaim that ethical grounding. I examine what it might mean to
understand accusation as we now experience it within criminal judgment as exemplifying the
deferral of the ethical encounter with the other. In order to accomplish this, I first examine
Camus’s representation of accusation in a post-metaphysical age, for which the character of
Jean-Baptiste provides the paradigm. While it might first appear that Jean-Baptiste’s
encounters with the trauma of his past – the drowning of a woman on a bridge whom he did
not help – allow him to see a deeper ethics by recognizing how the self needs to be accused,
we learn that this is not, in fact, the case. Rather, the trauma that Jean-Baptiste reveals is
not the woman on the bridge per se, which I argue is merely the ersatz object that Jean-
Baptiste uses as another form of self-deception, but the forgetfulness of the deeper ethical
constitution of our social existence.

The first two sections of this chapter will explore Camus’s development of the judge-penitent
character, Jean-Baptiste, in order to examine initially how Camus understands accusation in
a post-metaphysical age. The historical genealogy of accusation, signified through the John
the Baptist analogy, suggests a flattening of the ethical import of previous ethical structures
that have become rationalized. I argue that this flattening is a form of forgetfulness that,
Ricoeur (1974a) suggests, entails both loss and gain. For the main character of the novel,
however, accusation merely reveals the many levels of distanciation he erects to avoid losing
his “elevation” from others and, ultimately, to avoid recognizing his responsibility to others.

The next section of this chapter analyzes the significance in the novel of the famous stolen
panel The Just Judges, from the Ghent Altarpiece, in order to elucidate what Camus might
mean regarding the separation of innocence from justice. I argue that this hiding of justice is
the symbol of Jean-Baptiste’s forgetfulness as he seals the cupboard doors that now house
the painting. I argue that this separation of innocence from justice must be uncovered
through a destructive hermeneutics of the myths and symbols that perpetuate forgetfulness.
I draw from Ricoeur’s texts to understand the historical, mythological, and even libidinal
grounds of accusation that allow us to pave the way to a form of ethics not based on
forgetfulness.

In the final two sections I explore further, with Levinas, how accusation, the primordial call
to exist as a subject among others, resembles a self-accusation: an apprehension by the social
world that allows an ethics grounded in becoming a subject accountable to others and to
whom others are also accountable. However, since the subject is a trace of this fundamental
accusation, it can be forgotten at the expense of the ego. Thus the necessity of self-
accusation; it is this formulation of self-accusation as a non-metaphysical principle of justice,
justice based on the kerygma of the other, that can provide the philosophical reframing of
criminal accusation.

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THE NOVEL
The novel opens in a bar in Amsterdam called Mexico City, where Jean-Baptiste approaches
a stranger to offer assistance in acquiring drinks from the proprietor, whom he calls a
“worthy ape.” He then proceeds to hold a series of six conversations with the stranger,
signified in time by the division of chapters, moving from the bar into different parts of
Amsterdam under the pretense of showing the stranger different sights, ending finally in
Jean-Baptiste’s apartment. We read essentially a monologue in which Jean-Baptiste
confesses the many events that have led him to Mexico City, from the heights of a sensual
and materially successful existence as a lawyer in Paris, to a prisoner camp in Tunis, and
finally to the red-light district in Amsterdam.

Through the first couple of chapters, Jean-Baptiste confesses to a past characterized by both
virtuousness and hedonism, when he was a socialite of shallow connections who defended the
poor and downtrodden. He describes himself as successful and charming, physically and
verbally gifted, and appreciated by the opposite sex. He relays with some nostalgic remorse
the heights that he aspired to, not only above people in his everyday dealings, but also
physically – he would escape the valley and low plains for mountains, and subways and taxis
for trains and plains. He confesses that his profession let him sit above all, both judge and
jury. He opines, “Just weigh this, cher monsieur, I lived with impunity, I was concerned in no
judgment; I was not on the floor of the courtroom, but somewhere in the flies like those gods
that that are brought down by machinery from time to time to transfigure the action and
give it its meaning” (Camus 1991a, 25). Not only did he distance himself from the judgment
and accusation of others lower than him, but he likens himself to a kind of ubermensch; in
his judgment, he envisages himself as loftily establishing new values and justifying the
action of lesser people.

We learn that the trauma which eventually shattered his distanced, virtuous, hedonistic life
in Paris was the apparent suicide of a young woman. He walked by her on a bridge but did
nothing after she jumped into the river below, and rationalized his own lack of involvement.
This “fall,” as Jean-Baptiste describes the sojourn between Paris and Amsterdam, happens
gradually over a period of two years as he becomes more recalcitrant and more susceptible to
the perception of judgment of himself and others. Finally, on a cruise, the impact of the event
reveals itself to him as a kind of traumatic rupture and repetition of the girl jumping off the
bridge. His life unravels henceforth, as he realizes that his self-professed elevation and
dissociation from others as a lawyer in Paris is itself based on a duplicitous and sacrificial
logic that depends on the downfall of others or, at the very least, perpetual separation from
others. Here is the scene:

One day, however, during a trip to which I was treating a friend without telling her I was
doing so to celebrate my cure, I was aboard an ocean liner – on the upper deck, of course.
Suddenly, far off at sea, I perceived a black speck on the steel-gray ocean. I turned away at
once and my heart began to beat wildly. When I was forced to look, the black speck had
disappeared. I was on the point of shouting, of stupidly calling for help, when I saw it again.
It was one of those bits of refuse that ships leave behind them. Then I realized, calmly as you
resign yourself to an idea the truth of which you have long known, that that cry which had

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sounded over the Seine behind me years before had never ceased, carried by the river to the
waters of the Channel, to travel throughout the world, across the limitless expanse of the
ocean, and that it had waited for me there until the day I had encountered it. I realized
likewise that it would continue to await me on seas and rivers, everywhere, in short, where
lies the bitter water of my baptism. (Camus 1991a, 108–9)

The traumatic remembrance of the dying girl in the water spontaneously ruptures in his
consciousness as an opening, an accusation, to the realization of his capacity for being judged
accountable. However, as I will explore in the next section, this realization rather reflects a
deepening of his self-deception and disassociation from others, and, in one scholar’s
interpretation, resembles the fall and rise of Lucifer more than that of Icarus (Cryle 2014,
265).

CAMUS AND SELF-ACCUSATION

Jean-Baptiste’s transformation from successful lawyer in Paris to judge-penitent in
Amsterdam’s red-light district transpires because of the realization that everyone, including
himself, is subject to judgment and is fundamentally guilty and implicated within all others’
crimes. Even, to speak of the Ghent Altarpiece, the holy lamb whose blood spills for the mass
of pilgrims is guilty. For Jean-Baptiste, even Christ, whose prophesied existence led to the
justification of the slaughter of the innocents, has blood on his hands. The fall that Jean-
Baptiste experiences is, in fact, the baptism in the possible destruction of innocence. Through
this monologue, the main character invites the interlocutor seductively into judgment and
even into self-accusation.

We might recognize in this “monologue of self-accusation” (Roeming 1959, 145) something of

Socrates’ Apology, another foundational scene of accusation: there are silent interlocutors,
yet, as with several of the tropes and symbolic nodes within this novel, it is an inverted
mordant reference. Instead of the mise en scène of the agora, we have a seedy bar in
Amsterdam’s red-light district; instead of addressing a particular set of juridical accusations,
Jean-Baptiste is merely accusing himself. At the same time, this self-accusation is
disingenuous and insidious: he accuses himself in order to elicit self-accusation in others, the
silent interlocutors. Clearly, Clamence is producing an irony in the title of judge-penitent –
all lawyers and judges are also guilty and must repent. Those who feel themselves above the
fold must also judge themselves, for fear of inauthenticity. It is this sense of self-accusation
that sits at the base of the novel.

However, we must dig deeper in order to get to an understanding of the significance of

accusation in the novel, and specifically self-accusation. Self-accusation is initially referenced
with the laugh that increasingly plagues Jean-Baptiste until the cruise, when he recognizes
the trauma that has followed him. Jean-Baptiste’s repressed guilt manifests through the
novel as a subdued laughter that continually ruptures his consciousness and forces him to
confront his responsibility to the girl on the bridge. This guilt, in the end, brings him to the
scene of many profound wrongs – to a German prisoner camp in Tunis, and finally to the old
Jewish quarter, located in the centre of the concentric canals of Amsterdam, which he likens
to circles of hell, referencing another iconic text, Dante’s Inferno, signifying, possibly, his own

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personal hell (Aronson 2012). This laugh suggests an ambivalence of judgment that is coming
both from within but also from outside the self, which suggests that authentic judgment
always already comes from outside the self as a form of calling. However, since Clamence
abhors being accused by others and is always far from judgment himself, he is unable to
really hear the primordial call to responsibility for one’s freedom. Indeed, the recognition of
his primordial responsibility is obfuscated by his continual, repetitive, and compulsive ego –
self-accusation, for Jean-Baptiste, is a mechanism with which he can still maintain his
height beyond judgment and out of the reach of accusation from others.

I argue that this is the moment of Jean-Baptiste’s choice: through an authentic form of self-
accusation, he could recognize his primordial responsibility, or he could use this as a way of
forgetting the ethical grounding of our sociality, as a form of self-deception. It is clear he
chooses the latter. Cryle (2014, 265) suggests that the fall signified in his act of self-
accusation “is not defeat, the natural end of hubris, so much as the beginning of a radically
new enterprise that consists in bringing down others.” Where Camus’s philosophy is directed
to understanding freedom in terms of an indeclinable responsibility, Jean-Baptiste continues
to experience the symbol of his fall as a traumatic repetition beckoning to be understood and
revealed. But just as Freud suggests in Beyond the Pleasure Principle regarding the fourth
principle of repetition, which he termed destiny neurosis, Jean-Baptiste continually replays
his trauma with the appearance of water, leading him to Amsterdam. This “‘perpetual
recurrence of the same thing’ causes us no astonishment ... when we can discern in him an
essential character-trait which always remains the same and which is compelled to find
expression in a repetition of the same experiences” (Freud 1961, 16). That Jean-Baptiste
continually sees this trauma of the woman in the bodies of water that he visits suggests the
actual source of the trauma is something the woman drowning signifies that he never
uncovers, but that determines his life direction nonetheless. Furthermore, Ricoeur (2004)
reminds us of Freud’s understanding of melancholia, in which remembrance of the lost object
leads to an experience of authentic working through, or self-accusation. We could understand
Jean-Baptiste’s experience of self-accusation in this manner, with his repetition of the ersatz
object of his trauma obfuscating the responsibilization that might have occurred with an
authentic remembrance. Instead, in a melancholic form of repetition, the ego turns in on
itself, accusing itself in an aggressive solipsism (Ricoeur 2004, 73).

We understand that Jean-Baptiste continually defers the full realization of his responsibility
when he discloses his techniques as a judge-penitent. At that point, we learn that he is not
accusing himself to witness his inherent responsibility and obligation to others, but, rather,
as a kind of last-ditch effort to maintain the heights to which he became so accustomed in
Paris. As the modern, secular judge-penitent, Jean-Baptiste, in a layered form of self-
deception, accuses himself in a compulsive repetition to absolve himself of the inherent
responsibility that is forgotten in a modern age. He reveals the technique of his “profession”
late in the novel: in his self-accusations he “skillfully ... multiplies distinctions and
digressions,” which would lead the “listener to go me one better.” Further, through this
drawing of the other into self-accusations that are worse than his, he constructs “a portrait of
all and of no one. A mask, in short, rather like those carnival masks which are both lifelike
and stylized” (Camus 1991a, 139). In the judgment of himself and others, he creates a kind of
grotesque mirror – he, in effect, frames the reality into which the individual is being drawn.

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This issues a particular aspect of accusation, which we will draw out further in this chapter,
where accusation functions as a violent sundering of the self that effaces the other. Clamence
further reveals his masterful technique thus:

Covered with ashes, tearing my hair, my face scored by clawing, but with piercing eyes, I
stand before all humanity recapitulating my shames without losing sight of the effect I am
producing, and saying: “I was the lowest of the low.” Then imperceptibly I pass from the “I”
to the “we.” When I get to “This is where we are,” the trick has been played and I can tell him
off ... However, I have a superiority in that I know it and this gives me the right to speak ...
The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better, I provoke you
into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of the burden. (140)

So, where we might be tempted to understand Jean-Baptiste’s fall as one of ascertaining

greater clarity through a form of self-accusation, in fact, self-accusation merely absolves him
from the full realization of responsibility. If, for Camus, the “absurd man” must live in a
state of paradox, then freedom must be attained by recognizing one’s profound responsibility
to others (Camus 1991c). Just as Socrates accuses others who consider themselves wise and
thus understands himself as the wisest because he recognizes what he does not know, Jean-
Baptiste, as the guiltiest, brings others to his level. Yet we see, in the previous quote, that
Jean-Baptiste’s self-accusation is deceptive, and he lacks freedom because he does not accept
the full consequences of his actions. In other words, for Camus, Jean-Baptiste is a figure that
allows him to critique accusation as a mechanism of self-deception that prevents us from
witnessing this inherent constitution of our social selves.

The major symbols in the novel, its tone, the evasive, dark character of Jean-Baptiste, and its
sardonic, mordant, ironic character places The Fall in a critical relation to certain modes of
being. We understand that self-accusation, in the manner in which Jean-Baptiste practises
it, entails a critique not only of existentialism and nihilism, but also of modern conditions of
judgment that these cultural movements signify. Camus (1991b, 22) writes in The Myth of
Sisyphus:

Now, to limit myself to existential philosophies, I see that all of them without
exception suggest escape. Through an odd reasoning, starting out from the absurd
over the ruins of reason, in a closed universe limited to the human, they deify what
crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is
religious in all of them.

In other words, these forms of thinking begin with an understanding similar to Camus’s that
life is indeed absurd, but instead of confronting and revolting against this they build
theoretical constructions based on absurdity. Camus, in contrast, was interested in
examining the modern moral consciousness through the perspective of his notion of
absurdity: life is suffering, and our innate connection to each other is the understanding that
we all share in this suffering. It has been noted by some scholars that the main précis of this
novel is taken from Camus’s more acerbic writings against existentialism in his later
notebooks, where he states: “Existentialism. Whenever they accuse themselves, you can be
sure it is invariably in order to assail others. Penitent judges” (Camus 2008, 131). Roeming
(1959, 145) concedes that
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since Camus has made the absence of values the philosophical center of his work, he
cannot accept the absolute values of traditional humanism. He is concerned with a
restatement of moral values which can be contained within the limits of man’s
reason. These moral values must necessarily rise from suffering, since the absurdity
of the world is cruel and hostile. Since all men are confronted with the same hostility
and cruelty, they are bound to each other in a dual bond; they are the cause of their
own suffering; and, through solidarity, the cause of their own moral judgments. But
to achieve that solidarity through that recognition of guilt and acceptance of penance
man must first examine his conscience.

So, then, self-accusation, in the form of examining conscience to recognize one’s inherent
obligation to others, is a fundamental precept of Camus’s philosophy wherein he may be
attempting to establish ethics as first philosophy, “an explanation of man of all ages”
(Roeming 1959, 148). If this is so, then The Fall is an examination of a modern consciousness
that has lost its ground of values, yet retains the conceptual structures of a previous moral
consciousness. Camus has indicated, in fact, that these contemporary philosophies have
much in common with the form of thinking of early Christian ascetics (Camus 1991b). He
makes this especially clear with the character of Jean-Baptiste. The vanquishing of morals
that Camus witnesses leads him to understand the current moral consciousness, as
expressed by existentialism and nihilism, as a kind of self-deception that evokes a
forgetfulness.

In the next section I will examine Ricoeur’s understanding of metaphysics as forgetfulness

when previous value systems have been eliminated from the symbols of our history
(producing form devoid of content). The divestment of the content of symbols leads to a
flattening and a forgetfulness of the authentic meaning of the symbols that structure social
and ethical relations between people. For Camus, the forgetfulness of symbols leads to a form
of innocence and a paradoxical inversion of the ethical consciousness. My contention is that
Jean-Baptiste Clamence exhibits forgetfulness in the paradoxical narcissism of his self-
accusation. He might then signify a particular kind of corruption of Camus’s contention of
absolute obligation and responsibility, based on his critique of judgment in a nihilistic
framework. Through the silent interlocutor’s implication of us within Jean-Baptiste’s
“monologue of self-accusation,” Camus makes us complicit, if not in the guilt that each one of
us shares for the other and for history, at least in the ruse that Jean-Baptiste is desperately
playing on himself. In the place where he can fall no further, he has finally granted himself
the ability to stand above those he instructs by disclosing the depths of his guilt in order to
displace it onto his listener. Nevertheless, as it is for both Ricoeur and Camus, this
destruction of values is not entirely negative, but also establishes the possibility to creatively
move beyond. Indeed, in the preface to the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus (1991b, 3) writes that
“this book declares that even within the limits of nihilism is the means to proceed beyond
nihilism.”

THE JUST JUDGES AND THE FORGETFULNESS OF ACCUSATION

Despite Camus’s noted proclivity for understanding something of human nature (our
duplicitous, desirous, deceptive, and narcissistic tendencies), part of this nature necessarily

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implicates the historical expression of causal relations. Camus’s use of the Just Judges
allows us, interestingly, to explore accusation from a couple of different vantage points that
can extend our discussion of accusation to examine which social discourses Camus suggests
are at the root of Jean-Baptiste’s self-deception. Camus’s intention in using the Just Judges
as a narrative trope is to examine further his understanding of a particular historical
genealogy of accusation. That is, we get from Camus the contingent historicity of accusation
as a product of historical, social, and religious discourses. Further, these discourses are the
foundation of what could be considered the forgetfulness of accusation.

In the final chapter of the novel, Camus describes how the painting The Just Judges
illuminates the social and moral discourses that Jean-Baptiste uses to further his own self-
deception. At this point, Jean-Baptiste and the interlocutor are in his apartment, since Jean-
Baptiste is ill. The apartment is located in what was the old Jewish quarter of Amsterdam
before the Second World War, but is now the red-light district. Not only was this a site of
what Jean-Baptiste describes as “one of the greatest crimes in history,” but it is also the site
where The Just Judges, a lost and stolen panel from the great Jan Van Eyck’s Adoration of
the Lamb, also known as the Ghent Altarpiece, was located. The proprietor of the bar,
unaware of the gravity of the situation and the risk posed by having the painting in his
possession, is convinced to hide it with Jean-Baptiste, who conceals the painting in a
cupboard. After describing the painting and its theft, which has led to its acquisition by
Jean-Baptiste, the interlocutor asks why Clamence did not return it. In customary sardonic
wit, he replies:

First, because it belongs not to me but to the proprietor of Mexico City, who deserves it as
much as the Archbishop of Ghent. Secondly, because among all those who file by “The
Adoration of the Lamb” no one could distinguish the copy from the original and hence no one
is wronged by my misconduct. Thirdly, because in this way I can dominate. False judges are
held up to the world’s admiration and I alone know the true ones. Fourth, because I thus
have a chance of being sent to prison – an attractive idea in a way. Fifth, because those
judges are on their way to meet the Lamb, because there is no more lamb or innocence, and
because the clever rascal who stole the panel was an instrument of the unknown justice that
one ought not to thwart. Finally, because in this way everything is in harmony. Justice being
definitively separated from innocence – the latter on the cross and the former in the
cupboard – I have the way clear to work according to my convictions. (Camus 1991a, 129-
130)

In this confession of the reasons for stowing away the painting, Jean-Baptiste declares that
the Just Judges, who are on their way to receive their own penitence from the lamb, have
now been cut off from ever actually getting to the lamb. By locking them up in a cupboard,
Jean-Baptiste is free to practise his profession of bringing people to the form of self-
accusation he desires so he can once again stand in ultimate judgment over everyone. His
inability to realize the full implications of judgment and obligation to others leads him to a
kind of cognitive substitution for the kind of judgment that allows his own expiation of guilt.
This is Jean-Baptiste’s fall – by recognizing the guilt implicit in his very existence, he means
to infect and corrupt others into a greater accusation than his own. That justice and
innocence are finally separated suggests that the principles Clamence is holding on to are

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principles that lead to a form of self-deception that would be threatened if one were to act
according to an understanding of justice. In this manner, Camus is suggesting that justice in
the modern world has been forgotten for metaphysical principles (“convictions”) that prevent
people from understanding the true source of human solidarity.

This connection between self-deception and forgetfulness can be taken a bit further with
Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of forgetfulness. Ricoeur was influenced by Heidegger’s
understanding of the forgetfulness of being, in which technical languages and causal
explanations in effect take us further away from an understanding or apprehension of Being.
For Heidegger, this forgetfulness can take the form of thinking that reifies itself as self-
evident and assumed. He writes that even tradition, as a taken-for-granted, truth-bearing
mode of being in the world, leads to the obfuscation of a mode of reflection that does not
distance us from Being, as such:

Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it
blocks our access to those primordial “sources” from which the categories and
concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it
makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the
necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even
understand. (Heidegger 1962, 43)

Ricoeur suggests that the current critical age is also a flattening and forgetting, embedded
within symbols. However, in contrast to Heidegger’s reflection that what has been forgotten
is Being, Ricoeur believes that it is the mythological, heirophanic, and sacred construction of
our symbolic consciousness that has been lost. Contemporary language reflects a
forgetfulness of the etiological significance of these myths and thus reflects a flattening, a
demythologization, and a desacralization of our experience of the world. He writes, in the
Symbolism of Evil:

The historical moment of the philosophy of symbols is that of forgetfulness and

restoration. Forgetfulness of hierophanies, forgetfulness of the signs of the sacred,
loss of man himself insofar as he belongs to the sacred. The forgetfulness, we know, is
the counterpart of the great task of nourishing men [sic], of satisfying their needs by
mastering nature through a planetary technique. It is in the age when our language
has become more precise, more univocal, more technical in a word, ... it is in this very
age of discourse that we want to recharge our language, that we want to start again
from the fullness of language. (Ricoeur 1969, 349)

For Ricoeur, then, forgetfulness is a result of the deconstruction of myths that explain
humanity in relation to the sacred, and a result of forgetting the ontological significance of
symbols. This forgetfulness is expressed in the analogy with St. John the Baptist: Jean-
Baptiste lives a life of luxury and privilege, yet, despite this, he has chosen a life of penance
to call others to penance. However, Jean-Baptiste’s form of penance is to call others to a form
of self-accusation that is short-circuited in a solipsistic logic of judgment. Even more than
this, the kind of nihilism that Camus criticizes with the John the Baptist analogue also
suggests that Jean-Baptiste’s form of accusation is the logical culmination of the Christian
myth of the destruction of innocence. Camus’s use of Jean-Baptiste exemplifies his
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contention that secular humanism, existentialism, and nihilism represent a forgetfulness

based on metaphysical principles that obscure the actual ground for freedom and
responsibility.

However, Camus and Ricoeur both believe this destruction of myths has two sides: at once
loss and, at the same time, gain. The corollary of passing through an age of critique to
deconstruct the etiological significance of myths that held truth statements and explanations
of the world is the enriching of language via symbols that furnish our consciousness. In other
words, what has been lost has been recovered as what they truly were: symbols. Ricoeur
(1974a) explains further, in The Conflict of Interpretations, that what happens in the
deconstruction of these mythologies is the possibility of deconstructing the myth-based
pseudo-gnostic explanations of the world. This clearing away acts as a mode of recovery. In
the age of critique, the forgetfulness of metaphysics has left us with the philosophical tools
that give us the ability to uncover a more fundamental mode of reflection. He suggests in
“Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I” (Ricoeur 1974c) and “Religion,
Atheism, Faith” (Ricoeur 1974f) that a destructive hermeneutics of symbols allows us to
reach a point in philosophical reflection where we can achieve a new grounding of ethics, that
of conatus essendi (Ricoeur 2004). We may recall that Spinoza (2005) used this term to refer
to an essential characteristic of all beings that lies in their effort and desire to exist; Ricoeur
interprets the ground of the subject to be desire for that which lies outside of itself.

Ricoeur’s understanding of conatus situates his critique of contemporary nihilism. His

critique of religion is captured in the final sentence of “Religion, Atheism, Faith”: “an idol
must die so that a symbol of being may speak” (Ricoeur 1974f, 462). For Ricoeur, nihilism can
be understood as the critique of accusation in an ethical consciousness. This critique, while
acting like a stage of mourning in which there is a fundamental loss to meaning frameworks,
at the same time contains the potential for working-through. For Ricoeur, this mourning
instantiates the possibility for a new kind of morality. The death of God signifies the
destruction of the God of morality and the pseudo-gnostic ground of values and morals, which
allows the possibility to establish an ethics based on a foundation of the essential human
structure of the effort to exist. By extension, if we apply a destructive hermeneutics to the
various social discourses, myths, and libidinal drives that motivate an axiomatic conception
of ethics, we can uncover a more fundamental source of our relations with others with the
term conatus. The essence of being human, for Ricoeur, is filled with others who structure
our subjectivity. For him, the effort to exist is a significant step on the way to establishing a
form of consolation bracketed from desire, the consolation of existing with the hearkening
that Heidegger evokes – a kind of silent listening to Being through word, or logos (Ricoeur
1974f, 445–47).

THE MYTHOLOGY OF ACCUSATION

I would like to turn now to Paul Ricoeur’s destructive hermeneutics of accusation in order to
reveal the manner in which the mythology of accusation merely covers over a more
foundational kind of accusation that Camus, Ricoeur, and Levinas express in their writings.
Ricoeur’s critique of accusation can help us uncover the hidden discourses, or mythologies,
that motivate the accusatory agency in the “judging consciousness.” In Symbolism of Evil,

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Ricoeur (1969) analyzes the symbolic consciousness of the confession of evil as existing at the
foundations of scientific and speculative interpretations of fault. The experience of evil – the
symbolic expression of doing and experiencing evil – is signified by the predominant theme of
the “servile will,” which furnishes the fundamental symbols of evil in defilement, sin, and
guilt, and within the major myths of the beginning and end of evil. Ricoeur analyzes the
symbolic experience that poses an impasse to speculative thinking that would allow us to
formally understand human experience. He suggests that the experience of evil cannot be
considered philosophically without first understanding the symbolic origins of such an
experience. So then, evil is a limit experience that phenomenology cannot analyze because it
is a purely symbolic, but profound, experience that also structures our consciousness, social
world, and conditions the foundations of philosophical thought.

Similarly, in his analysis of the themes of accusation and punishment, Ricoeur extends his
critique of the symbolic foundations of social discourses and philosophy through a Freudian
destructive hermeneutics of the implicit motivations within philosophical expressions of the
ethical consciousness. What his essays (Ricoeur 1974b, 1974c, 1974d, 1974e) can help us
understand further are the mythical and symbolic foundations structuring the ethical and
religious consciousness that frames the contingency of accusation. Ricoeur understands
accusation to exist in the mythical foundation of an ethical consciousness. In this
formulation, Ricoeur is concerned with the discursive foundations of the imperative of a
formal ethics, such as that developed by Kant. For Ricoeur, accusation precedes a moral
consciousness symbolically; through a Freudian critique of the axiomatic analysis of
morality, we can see the motivations that are implicit within the judging consciousness.
Within this analysis, Ricoeur is able to see Kant’s first philosophy not as foundational in
itself, but, rather, built on signifying and symbolic discourses – what Ricoeur calls a pseudo-
gnosticism for establishing transcendental claims out of contingent and historical myths.
What Kant sees as primary, we can see, through Ricoeur’s use of Freud, as a secondary
rationalization in which accusation is the neurotic foundation of the ethical worldview. In
other words, the truth of axiomatic ethics is accusation. This is what Ricoeur calls the
neurotic analogy, wherein law/duty – “the father” in Freudian terms – is shown to be
contingent through a series of figurative substitutions. Accusation and consolation are
sublimations representing the corrupt aspects of religion and ethics. In this manner, a
critique of accusation reveals the “false transcendence of the imperative” (Ricoeur 1974b,
333).

Ricoeur (1974b, 336) suggests that the demystification of accusation is a work of mourning
since, as he writes, “it is from the stuff of our desires that our renunciations are made.” He
makes the connection to Freud’s (1953) “Mourning and Melancholia” by suggesting that the
ethical consciousness depends on a sense of obligation, and, hence, accusation, and reflects a
lost object that must be recovered in order to instantiate a recovery of an ethics not based on
mythology. The critique of accusation then remains at the core of the demythization of formal
ethics and, by extension, is at the base of the deconstruction of religion that founds itself
upon interdiction and condemnation. By subjecting accusation to a demystification, we can
examine the mythical, irrational, and contingent within the accusatory agency. One might
refer to Pavlich’s article the “Lore of Accusation,” in which he examines the “ritualized
ethico-political assertions of limit formation, displacements that forge boundaries by calling

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subjects to account on suspicion of disrupting an imagined order,” which are embedded

within moments of criminal accusation (Pavlich 2007, 85). By examining a few paradigmatic
cases in the history of the Cape of Good Hope, Pavlich shows us that the processes through
which people become judged are not purely rational retributions of transgressions, but are
also contingent narratives that inaugurate individuals within the juridical system by
demarcating the ethico-political ordering of the social world. Similarly, when he evokes the
Oresteia, Ricoeur suggests that we need to move past Hegel’s rationalization of the
relationship between crime and its punishment to uncover the logic of expiation that exists
at the heart of punishment. The relationship between the judging consciousness and judged
consciousness is filled with meaning, symbols, and myth. Merely tearing asunder the myths
embedded within punishment to uncover a rationale for punishment is not enough to think
through a new logic.

LEVINAS AND ACCUSATION

We may now draw further connections between Ricoeur, Camus, and, finally, Levinas (1998)
in Otherwise Than Being to examine further the philosophical significance of accusation, and
to take another step toward uncovering the forgetfulness of the ethical moment within
accusation. In an exposition of the phenomenological experience of the generation of meaning
in consciousness, Levinas examines the conditions of possibility to build ethics as first
philosophy, circumventing metaphysics, onto-theology, and axiomatic constructions of an
ethical consciousness. Levinas’s writing is a figurative – or as Ricoeur (1992) describes it,
hyperbolic – exploration of the emergence of meaning and signification for the subject. In this
schema, consciousness arises as from a proclamation to participate within a particular kind
of intersubjectivity. The subject, by being able to take the place of the other, is continually
deferred and even substituted at the moment of this call. According to Levinas, the other
calls one into existence who overwhelms the ego before there even is an ego.

For Levinas, this call is similar to an accusation: we stand accused of our responsibility to
others, and it is in this primordial accusation, then, that we are called to account for our
existence. As an origin of the subject, accusation functions as a kind of beckoning – or, as
Levinas puts it, kerygma – but in being beckoned one is implicated within a social existence.
In other words, accusation refers to the absolute obligation to and for others that is at the
core of our sense of being human. For Levinas, this accusation is heavy; it bears the weight of
all others’ responsibilities, obligations, crimes, and guilts:

Vulnerability, exposure to outrage, to wounding, passivity more passive than all patience,
passivity of the accusative form, trauma of accusation suffered by a hostage to the point of
persecution, implicating the identity of the hostage who substitutes himself for the others: all
this is the self, a defecting or defeat of the ego’s identity. And this, pushed to the limit, is
sensibility, sensibility as the subjectivity of the subject. It is a substitution for another, one in
the place of another, expiation. (Levinas 1998, 15)

This responsibilization establishes the possibility of sacrifice: to be accused is to bear

responsibility for the other and the other’s responsibility. Thus, an accusation does not only
create a subject and erase one that is already there (as with the concept of master-status in

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labelling theory), but accusation also establishes the profundity of the obligation that the
social places on us before we have any sense of self. Thus, for Levinas, accusation represents
the manner by which we are implicated into the social as a foundational trauma that
instantiates subjectivity.

At the origin of our consciousness is a kind of primordial passivity that always already is
vulnerable to the other. He writes: “The uniqueness of the self is the very fact of bearing the
fault of another. In responsibility for another subjectivity is only this unlimited passivity of
an accusative which does not issue out of a declension it would have undergone starting with
the nominative” (Levinas 1998, 112). This quote suggests that the call, the accusation, the
kerygma that calls one into existence establishes within us a certain kind of receptiveness.
This receptiveness, what Levinas terms “passivity,” exists in the accusative, meaning there
is only the “accusative” before there is the subject, or how Levinas terms it, “the nominative.”
The accusative suggests that we are fundamentally receptive to the social as an indelible
aspect of the self. The self, then, is only possible through the responsibility that one innately
shares for the other, to which this originary passivity points. Thus, through accusation, we
acknowledge the other in us before we are ourselves, which inculcates us into not only our
innate sociability, but also a limitless responsibility for others. Levinas further writes:

This response answers, before any understanding, for a debt contracted before any freedom
and before any consciousness and any present, but it does answer, as though the invisible
that bypasses the present left a trace by the very fact of bypassing the present. That trace
lights up as the face of a neighbor, ambiguously him before whom (or to whom, without any
paternalism) and him for whom I answer. For such is the enigma or exception of a face, judge
and accused. (Levinas 1998, 12)

For Levinas, Ricoeur reminds us, “elevation – the Face of the Other – it has been said,
summons me as though from Sinai” (Ricoeur 1992, 337). The other that we encounter is the
trace of this originary accusation that beckons kerygmatically. In contrast, Jean-Baptiste is
the one who is summoning others and, in effect, reversing the primacy of other in an ethical
ontology as seen in Levinas and Ricoeur. For Camus, not only does Jean-Baptiste represent
the inversion of ethical symbols in a modern consciousness, but he also effects a reversal of
this foundation of indeclinable responsibility of which Levinas writes.

SELF-ACCUSATION, ETHICS, AND THE POSSIBILITY OF JUSTICE

Where a fundamental aspect of Socrates’ Apology is the critique of wisdom, Jean-Baptiste’s
dialogue is based on the critique of innocence. Jean-Baptiste sees his previous life of ease,
hedonism, and hypocritical principles as a stage of innocence and freedom. For Camus,
innocence refers to the humanist and existentialist adoption of principles, absolutes, and
metaphysical horizons in order to absolve one of the guilt that all people innately share. To
be sure, Jean-Baptiste is a hyperbolic figure that stands in for a particular kind of accusation
that might occur in a post-metaphysical time, accusation in a time without absolutes, where
justice has been forgotten. Through the character of Jean-Baptiste, Camus suggests the
foundations of accusation are principles that have been handed down to us through different
mythological and religious sources that have been stripped of their meaningful, ethical

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significance. Yet for both Camus and Ricoeur, this destruction of the meaningful is yet
another step along the route toward authenticity. For Ricoeur, we must pass through
atheism (the critique of myth) in order to fully participate in the symbolism of our culture
(Ricoeur 1974f). What might be inferred from Camus’s text, based on his other writings, is
that this critique is also a moment of creativity or possibility of discovering our absolute
responsibility to others, our inalienable substitution wherein we are always already in the
place of the other. Accusation for both Camus and Levinas, however, is also a self-accusation.
Levinas (1998, 125) writes:

In suffering by the fault of the other dawn’s suffering for the fault of others, supporting. The
for-the-other keeps all the patience of undergoing imposed by the other. There is substitution
for another, expiation for another. Remorse is the trope of the literal sense of the sensibility.
In its passivity is effaced the distinction between being accused and accusing oneself.

In this quote we see that every accusation is at once a self-accusation, since the other that
frames us and our responsibility is also a substitution for the responsibility for others and
the others’ responsibility. Since this accusation comes before any kind of subjectivity, and in
fact establishes the conditions of possibility for something like a self, the self is so completely
overwhelmed by the other that any thematizing into a subject is a trace of this originary
passivity. Levinas attempts to circumvent the possibility of another metaphysics, or even an
onto-theology, through this primordial substitution, the foundational accusation from the
other that is at the same time a self-accusation. Self-accusation is a revealing of the capacity
for understanding the inability to decline the social as a fundamental structure of selfhood.
So then justice, the primordial call to be with others, can only be recovered in self-accusation
and the uncovering of the ego as inherently responsible.

However, there is a further condition that can help establish the profundity of self-accusation
as a mode of critique of accusation: the condition of expiation. Ricoeur offers this
interpretation of the difference between Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being. In
the former, Levinas speaks of the other as the master of justice, since the face of the other
stands perpetually above us and calls to us. In the latter, the other becomes an offender and
a persecutor. Ricoeur argues that this difference completes the absolute condition of
substitution because it bequeaths on the subject the necessity for pardon and expiation. In
Ricoeur’s (2004, 338) estimation, “it is only here that the abyss hollowed out between
otherness and identity is bridged.”

This agency for expiation that establishes the necessity for an authentic encounter with the
other is the point that we must encounter to deconstruct criminal accusation. In order to
critique accusation as an oppressive framing and violent sundering of identity, we should
understand that accusation depends on the ability of the self to pardon the other. Jean-
Baptiste, as I have been reading him through the forgetfulness of his self-accusation, is
performing a discursive reversal of this primordial accusation. By reversing this primordial
substitution, accusation then reflects a solipsistic and tautological expression of
forgetfulness.

That is, maybe Jean-Baptiste is the paradigmatic figure for criminal accusation that reflects
the violent sundering of accusation as not merely a misrecognition, but also a blindness and
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a forgetfulness of the other. If accusation does not actually see the other within oneself, it
becomes a tautological reflection of Same. Thus, criminal accusation, by extension, only
expresses, extends, and mirrors the self in its governing possibilities. Accusation in this state
of forgetfulness only reflects the apparatus that is accusing. Levinas would further suggest
that “for an ego such as this, incapable of the other, the epiphany of the face ... signifies an
absolute exteriority, that is a nonrelative exteriority” (Ricoeur 1992, 337). The typical model
of criminal accusation, wherein the ethical moment is short-circuited for the solipsistic and
imperialist ego, can only reinforce itself in a moment of forgetfulness. What is forgotten in
criminal accusation are those others who are enclosed by the accusative gaze. Levinas (1998,
112) writes further: “The more I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the
traumatic effect of persecution, of my freedom as a constituted, willful, imperialist subject,
the more I discover myself to be responsible; the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am
in myself through the others.” Justice, then, entails the necessity for self-accusation since it
is through the uncovering of the originary responsibilization that one can recover the social
grounding of the self.

This is another necessity of self-accusation – through the authentic substitution of the self
through the other – the call to respond also implicates, according to Levinas, the call for
pardon and expiation. In self-accusation is embedded the germ for a model of accusation that
allows for an understanding of justice through the possibility of pardon of the accuser by the
accused. The ethical ramification of this “hyperbole” is that the accused is granted the ability
to expiate the accusative gaze. Both Levinas and Ricoeur understand there is an inherent
dissymmetry between self and other, in which the other is always primary in an ethical
ontology. For Ricoeur, the characteristic imperative of the primacy of the other in our
primordial origin takes the form of solicitude. Goodness and care are fundamental
implications of this responsibilization of the subject before subjectivization. Goodness and
care would be reflected in the capacity of the possibility for the expiation of the accused..
Ricoeur (1992, 191) writes, “This is perhaps the supreme test of solicitude, when unequal
power finds compensation in an authentic reciprocity in exchange, which, in the hour of
agony, finds refuge in the shared whisper of voices or the feeble embrace of clasped hands.”
For all these thinkers then, suffering is the characteristic feature that binds the other to us
in a dissymmetry. Justice depends on the accusation of the imperialist ego to uncover the
possibility of apprehending the dissymmetry between self and other.

CONCLUSION
To conclude, I would like to return to The Just Judges panel from the Ghent Altarpiece in
order to draw out further the conception of the relationship between forgetfulness in the
contingency of accusation, its destructive potential, and its contrast to the kind of self-
accusation that I have read through Camus, Ricoeur, and Levinas. I believe that this
painting and its history can exemplify an ethical understanding of the subject dependent on
the social, cultural, philosophical, political, and aesthetic climate in which it participates,
and maybe can act as a kind of historical analogue to that slippage between the
phenomenological and the ethical. The Just Judges, an element in what has been cited as the
most important and coveted oil painting in history, has had a much-storied existence. Since
its creation by Jan Van Eyck and inauguration in the church in 1432, it has been implicated

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in nearly every major social and historical change in Europe since the fifteenth century and
been subject to thirteen crimes. This painting has been accused anew for each epoch since its
creation (Charney 2010). It has been stolen, vandalized, targeted as an object of arson,
censored, sold, used as a bargaining tool, separated, split, and coveted by many sovereigns,
including Napoleon and Hitler. It barely escaped secularization; was hidden in a salt mine
during the Second World War; and has been repatriated, ransomed, examined, subject to
controversy, and scanned biometrically using the most current modern technology (Brand
Phillip 1971, Charney 2010, Ghetty Foundation 2014). This painting has sat at the vertices
of accusation through history. The different stages of accusation that the painting has
traversed reflect differing and shifting modes of governance and conditions of accusation.

This may recall, for the reader, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, in which Oresteia’s criminal accusation
is subject to a contest of justice wherein he is constituted as subject to accusation and
punishment, or not, depending on the form of ethics and justice that apprehends his killing
of his mother. In the confrontation between the Furies and Apollo, we see that the
confrontation of two different logics of accusation – the feminine, Dionysian, and the
masculine, Apollonian – determines the possibility of whether or not Oresteia can be accused.
In the subsumption of one form of justice into another, and through the new logic, Oresteia’s
accusation is thus dispelled. In the confrontation between two different modes of accusation,
and as we witness the painting through history, we see the historically contingent, ethical
ordering of individuals that frames and constitutes their subjectivity. Just as the painting is
accused anew for each epoch, its relation to the social world and the stories and myths that
frame structures of power also shift through time. Even though the painting is a singular
object (or subject) through history, it remains bound to differing forms of accusation
dependent on contemporaneous modes of judgment.

However, we see through Camus’s satire on the hyperbolic despair of the nihilism of
contemporary experience that the painting represents more than just the contingency of
accusation. Rather, it shows how this contingency lends itself to an obfuscation of the ethical
encounter with the other in the same way that Jean-Baptiste experienced self-accusation. In
accusation, we are led to the violent sundering and destruction of the other as a sacrificial
scapegoat for the self. In other words, I have been arguing that Camus’s text helps us to
exercise, to use Ricoeur’s words, “an accusation of accusation” (1974f), whereby uncovering
this mutability of accusation’s contingency points to a deeper constitution of an ethical
encounter with the other.

This novel and the painting help us think through the ways in which accusation is never just
about a singular individual – the accused. Instead, it reflects a world in which the accuser
and the accused are both framed and encounter each other. Thus, through the innately
intersubjective adventure of being, the subject is never closed but is accused into being
continuously by the other. Self-accusation in the manner that Levinas expresses suggests
that there is an enframing that is never fully determined or exhausted – our
intersubjectivities, through self-accusation, need to be constantly enacted and created, which
only reinforces the indelible interaction of the existential vicissitudes of the subject and the
historicity of values in which accusation participates.

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