Perjury and Pardon volume I 1st Edition

Jacques Derrida Ginette Michaud

Nicholas Cotton
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/perjury-and-pardon-volume-i-1st-edition-jacques-derri
da-ginette-michaud-nicholas-cotton/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Perjury and Pardon Volume I 1st Edition Jacques Derrida

(Author)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/perjury-and-pardon-volume-i-1st-
edition-jacques-derrida-author/

Writing and Difference Jacques Derrida

https://ebookmeta.com/product/writing-and-difference-jacques-
derrida/

An Event Perhaps A Biography of Jacques Derrida Peter

Salmon

https://ebookmeta.com/product/an-event-perhaps-a-biography-of-
jacques-derrida-peter-salmon/

The Gift of Death Literature in Secret Second Edition

Jacques Derrida

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-gift-of-death-literature-in-
secret-second-edition-jacques-derrida/
Distributions, Volume 3 1st Edition Jacques Simon

https://ebookmeta.com/product/distributions-volume-3-1st-edition-
jacques-simon/

Continuous Functions Volume 2 1st Edition Jacques Simon

https://ebookmeta.com/product/continuous-functions-volume-2-1st-
edition-jacques-simon/

Nicholas I and Official Nationality in Russia 1825 1855

Nicholas V. Riasanovsky

https://ebookmeta.com/product/nicholas-i-and-official-
nationality-in-russia-1825-1855-nicholas-v-riasanovsky/

Speech Therapy in Cleft Palate and Velopharyngeal

Dysfunction 1st Edition Ginette Phippen

https://ebookmeta.com/product/speech-therapy-in-cleft-palate-and-
velopharyngeal-dysfunction-1st-edition-ginette-phippen/

Christianity and the Eastern Slavs Volume 1 California

Slavic Studies Volume VIII Nicholas V. Riasanovsky
(Editor)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/christianity-and-the-eastern-slavs-
volume-1-california-slavic-studies-volume-viii-nicholas-v-
riasanovsky-editor/
PERJURY AND PARDON, VOLUME I
THE SEMINARS OF JACQUES DERRIDA
Edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf
 Perjury and Pardon
VOLUME I

Jacques Derrida
Edited by Ginette Michaud and Nicholas Cotton

Translated by David Wills

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO AND LONDON
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2022 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief
quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the
University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2022
Printed in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 12345

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81917-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81918-1 (e-book)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226819181.001.0001

Originally published in French as Le parjure et le pardon. Volume I. Séminaire

(1997–1998) © Éditions du Seuil, 2019. Portions of Session 4 were published in
French as Donner la mort © Éditions Galilée, 1999, pages 161–209. Portions of
Sessions 7–10 were published in French as “Le ruban de la machine à écrire.
Limited Ink II,” in Papier Machine. Le ruban de machine à écrire et autres
réponses © Éditions Galilée, 2001, pages 43–147. Portions of Session 1 were
published in French in Pardonner. L’impardonnable et l’imprescriptible © Éditions
Galilée, 2012, pages 9–72.

www.centrenationaldulivre.fr

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Derrida, Jacques, author. | Michaud, Ginette, 1955–, editor. | Cotton,

Nicholas, editor. | Wills, David, 1953–, translator. | Derrida, Jacques. Works.
Selections. English. 2009.
Title: Perjury and pardon / Jacques Derrida ; edited by Ginette Michaud and
Nicholas Cotton ; translated by David Wills.
Other titles: Parjure et le pardon. English (Wills)
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022– | Series:
The seminars of Jacques Derrida | Includes bibliographical references and
index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022003727 | ISBN 9780226819174 (volume 1, cloth) | ISBN
9780226819181 (volume 1, ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Forgiveness—Philosophy. | Forgiveness in literature.
Classification: LCC BF637.F67 D4713 2022 | DDC 155.9/2—dc23/eng/20220207
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022003727

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of

Paper).
 CONTENTS

Foreword to the English Edition

General Introduction to the French Edition
Editors’ Note
Translator’s Note

First Session

Second Session

Third Session

Fourth Session

Fifth Session

Appendix, Fifth Session—Discussion Session

Sixth Session

Appendix 1, Sixth Session

Appendix 2, Sixth Session

Seventh Session

Eighth Session

Ninth Session
Tenth Session

Appendix, Tenth Session—Restricted Session

Index of Proper Names
Footnotes
 FOREWORD TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

When the decision was made to edit and publish Jacques Derrida’s
teaching lectures, there was little question that they would and
should be translated into English. From early in his career, in 1968,
and annually thereafter until 2003, Derrida regularly taught at US
universities. It was his custom to repeat for his American audience
the lectures delivered to his students in France the same year.
Teaching first at Johns Hopkins and then at Yale, he read the
lectures in French as they had been written. But from 1987, when he
began teaching at the University of California, Irvine, Derrida
undertook to lecture in English, improvising on-the-spot translations
of his lectures. Recognizing that the greater part of his audience
outside of France depended on translation proved easier, however,
than providing a satisfying ad libitum English version of his own
elegant, complex, and idiomatic writing. In the circumstance, to his
evident joy in teaching was often added a measure of suffering and
regret for all that remained behind in the French original. It is to the
memory of Derrida the teacher as well as to all his students past and
still to come that we offer these English translations of “The
Seminars of Jacques Derrida.”
The volumes in this series are translations of the original French
editions published by Éditions du Seuil, Paris, in the collection
“Bibliothèque Derrida” under the direction of Katie Chenoweth. In
each case they will follow shortly after the publication of the
corresponding French volume. The scope of the project, and the
basic editorial principles followed in establishing the text, are
outlined in the “General Introduction to the French Edition,”
translated here. Editorial issues and decisions relating more
specifically to this volume are addressed in an “Editorial Note.”
Editors’ footnotes and other editorial interventions are mostly
translated without modification, but not in the case of footnoted
citations of quoted material, which refer to extant English
translations of the source as necessary. Additional translators’ notes
have been kept to a minimum. To facilitate scholarly reference, the
page numbers of the French edition are printed in the margin on the
line at which the new page begins.
Translating Derrida is a notoriously difficult enterprise, and while
the translator of each volume assumes full responsibility for the
integrity of the translation, as series editors we have also reviewed
the translations and sought to ensure a standard of accuracy and
consistency across the volumes. Toward this end, in the first phase
of work on the series, we have called upon the advice of other
experienced translators of Derrida’s work into English and wish to
thank them here: Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas, Elizabeth
Rottenberg, and David Wills, as well as all the other participants in
the Derrida Seminars Translation Project workshops.

Geoffrey Bennington
Peggy Kamuf
MARCH 2019
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE FRENCH
EDITION

Between 1960 and 2003, Jacques Derrida wrote some fourteen

thousand printed pages for the courses and seminars he gave in
Paris, first at the Sorbonne (1960–64), then at the École normale
supérieure, rue d’Ulm (1964–84), and then, for the last twenty years
of his life, at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales
(EHESS, 1984–2003). The series “The Seminars of Jacques Derrida,”
in the collection “Bibliothèque Derrida,” will make available the
seminars that Derrida gave at EHESS, four of which have already
appeared.1 This corresponds to the period in Derrida’s teaching
career when he had the freedom to choose the topics he was going
to treat, most often over two or even three years, in seminars that
were themselves organized into the following thematic series:
“Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism” (1984–88), “Politics of
Friendship” (1988–91), followed by the long sequence of “Questions
of Responsibility” (1991–2003), focusing successively on the secret
(1991–92), testimony (1992–95), hostility and hospitality (1995–97),
perjury and pardon (1997–99), the death penalty (1999–2001), and,
finally, questions of sovereignty and animality under the title “The
Beast and the Sovereign” (2001–3). We will here follow the logic
previously established for the final seminars of Jacques Derrida,
namely, publishing in reverse chronological order all the seminars
given at EHESS, all the while respecting the internal chronology of
each thematic series. In accordance with that plan “Perjury and
Pardon I” (1997–98) will be followed by “Perjury and Pardon II”
(1998–99), and so on up through the fourth volume of the first
series, titled “Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism.”
We have tried in our editorial work to remain as faithful as
possible to the text as Jacques Derrida wrote it and we present it
here with as few editorial interventions as possible. With very few
exceptions (for example, improvised sessions), Derrida would
prepare for each class session not notes but a continuous written
text, sometimes punctuated by references to the texts he was
quoting, didascalia (e.g., “comment”) indicating a time for
improvisation, and marginal or interlineal annotations. When we
have been able to locate tape recordings of the seminars, we have
also indicated in footnotes the oral comments that Derrida added to
his text in the course of a seminar session. It is likely that if Derrida
had himself published his seminars during his lifetime he would have
reworked them. This practice of reworking was in fact rather
common with Derrida, who frequently drew from the vast wealth of
material of his courses for lectures and texts he intended for
publication. This explains the fact that we sometimes find a partial
reworking or adaptation of a seminar in an already published work,
highlighting even further the dynamic and coherence that
characterized Derrida’s teaching, a laboratory where ideas were
tested and then frequently developed elsewhere in a more or less
modified form. That being said, most of the seminars that will
appear in the “Bibliothèque Derrida” have not been previously
published in any form: their publication can only greatly enrich the
corpus of Derrida’s thought by making available one of its essential
resources.

Katie Chenoweth, Head of the Editorial Committee

Geoffrey Bennington
Pascale-Anne Brault
Peggy Kamuf
Ginette Michaud
Michael Naas
Elizabeth Rottenberg
David Wills
 EDITORS’ NOTE

The seminar entitled “Perjury and Pardon [Le parjure et le pardon]”

was given by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en
sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, over a period of two academic
years (1997–98 and 1998–99). Presented first in French, the
seminar was repeated during Derrida’s regular visits as Distinguished
Professor of Philosophy, French and Comparative Literature, at the
University of California, Irvine, in 1998 and 1999, and at New York
University in 2001. The present volume contains the ten sessions
constituting the first year of the seminar.
We should first note the difference in word order of the seminar’s
title from one year to the next. In 1997–98, Derrida’s usual
computer file name, and that used on the typescript, is “PAR J/D
(Parjure/Pardon),” whereas for 1998–99 “Pardon/parjure” is the
systematic title. In the typescript for the seminar given in 1997–98,
Derrida himself comments on this matter on two occasions, namely,
in the First and Third Sessions;1 he comes back to it also in the First
Session of the 1998–99 year, explicitly referring to the title “Parjure
et pardon.”2 In the descriptions provided for the Annuaire de l’EHESS
[EHESS Annual Bulletin], the title for both years reads “Le parjure et
le pardon.” Therefore, even though the note for the text
“Versöhnung, ubuntu, pardon: quel genre?”3—a published article
corresponding to the first three sessions of the 1998–99 seminar—
refers to “Le pardon et le parjure,” we have chosen to use here the
title as indicated in the Annuaire de l’EHESS, which Derrida himself
provided, since that seems to us to take precedence for this volume
and that to follow.4
The most illuminating presentation of the “Perjury and Pardon”
seminar is that given by Derrida himself in the Annuaire de l’EHESS
1997–1998, where he makes clear what is at stake in the reflection
that he intends to develop in the course of the two-year class:

We have continued the cycle of research initiated in past years

concerning the current (philosophical, ethical, juridical or
political) stakes of the concept of responsibility.
Having privileged, as guiding thread, the themes of secrecy,
testimony and hospitality, we shall attempt to develop a
problematic of lying [parjure]. It concerns a certain experience
of evil, of malignity, or bad faith in cases where that negativity
takes the form of renunciation. With respect to the guarantee or
performative commitment “before the law”5 (the promise, oath-
swearing, giving one’s word, the word of honor, pledge, pact,
contract, alliance, debt, etc.), we will study diverse forms of
betrayal (lying, infidelity, denial, false testimony, perjury, unkept
promise, desecration, sacrilege, blasphemy, etc.) in different
fields (ethics, anthropology, law), and on the basis of various
textual corpora (exegetical, philosophical or literary, for
example).
We have attempted to link these questions of “evil” to that of
forgiveness. If forgiveness is neither excusing, forgetting,
amnesty, prescription, or the “political pardon,” if the possibility
of it is paradoxically measured against the unforgivable alone,
how does one think the “possibility” of this “impossibility?”
The trajectory sketched out this year works as much through
readings (the two works by Jankélévitch on forgiveness and
imprescriptibility, certain texts by Kant on the right to mercy,
biblical or Greek texts [Plato in particular], works that seem to
be more literary—Shakespeare [The Merchant of Venice or
Hamlet]—Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Kafka), as through analysis
of scenes of political “forgiveness” or “repentance” such as are
today proliferating throughout the world, in France or in South
Africa, but in fact on every continent.6
 In the typescript for the American seminar one can also find an
“Introductory Note” in which Derrida repeats that description,
slightly modifying the final sentence: “Although every fault is
essentially a perjury (failure of an at least implicit promise or duty),
the problematic would concern above all a certain determinate
experience of renunciation.” The paragraph then continues to the
end without further modification, after which Derrida adds a second
paragraph that clarifies further the aims and content of the seminar:
“This seminar is expected to continue over several years, similar to
each of its predecessors. For the first year, the bibliography that
follows will seem both excessive and minimal. But each of these
texts will call for reference on my part, beginning this year
(sometimes by allusion, sometimes with insistence over several
sessions). I will make things clear as we go.” There then follows a
three-page bibliography that contains the main references for the
two years of the seminar; for some of those he adds details for
clarification.7
In the “Lesson” that he presents at the 37th Colloquium of French-
Speaking Jews, dedicated to the question “How to Live Together?”
and held in Paris on December 5–7, 1998, Derrida develops the
stakes of the whole “Perjury and Pardon” seminar, which was then
ongoing, in a detailed manner:

If I have chosen the theme of confession, that is first of all

because of what is occurring today in the world, a kind of
general rehearsal, a scene, even a theatricalization of
confession, of return, and of repentance, which seems to me to
signify a mutation in process, a fragile one, to be sure, fleeting
and difficult to interpret, but functioning as the moment of an
undeniable rupture in the history of the political, of the juridical,
of relations among communities, civil society, and the state,
among sovereign states, international law, and NGOs, among
the ethical, the juridical, and the political, between the public
and the private, between national citizenship and an
international citizenship, even a metacitizenship, in a word,
 concerning a social bond that crosses the borders of these
ensembles called family, nation, or state. Sometimes
accompanied by what one names rightly or wrongly repentance,
sometimes preceded or accompanied by what one believes,
rightly or wrongly, must condition them—namely confession,
repentance, requests for forgiveness—scenes of confession are
proliferating and have even been accelerating for a few years,
months, weeks, every day in truth, in a public space
transformed by tele-technologies and by media capital, by the
speed and reach of communication, but also by the multiple
effects of a technology, a techno-politics and a techno-genetics
that unsettle at once all conditions: both the conditions of being
together (the supposed proximity, in the same instant, in the
same place and the same territory, as if the uniqueness of a
place on earth, of a soil, were becoming more and more—as
one says of a telephone and in the measure of the said
telephone—portable) and the conditions of what lives in its
technological relation to the nonliving, to hetero- or
homografting, to prosthesis, artificial insemination, cloning, and
so on. Largely exceeding the territory of the state or of the
nation, all these scenes of confession and of reexamination of
past crimes appeal to the testimony, even to the judgment of a
community, and so of a modality of living-together, virtually
universal but also virtually instituted as an infinite tribunal or
worldwide confessional.8

Beyond that movement of generalized repentance that was taking

place at the end of the 1990s, Derrida will, in this first year of the
seminar, take on the matter of forgiveness from the perspective of
questions of responsibility that he has made his focus, here as an
extension of the theme of hospitality previously dealt with in his
seminar. Derrida’s reflection starts out from this aporia: “one only
ever asks forgiveness for what is unforgivable.”9 Although
forgiveness is a notion inherited from more than one tradition—as he
will say, it concerns several quasi-triangles among diverse heritages
(Judaic, Christian, Koranic, Greek)—the process of it also eludes
those traditions and disturbs the categories of knowledge, sense,
history, and law that attempt to circumscribe it.10 Insisting on the
unconditionality of forgiveness, Derrida shows how its complex
temporality destabilizes all ideas of presence and even of the
subject: “who or what forgives?” he never stops asking. Pure
forgiveness is an event that breaks open and exceeds the modalities
of “comprehension,” of memory or forgetting, of a certain work of
mourning. Forgiveness is neither manifest nor localizable, but
instead remains heterogeneous to all phenomenality, all
theatricalization, or even all verbal language. Interrupting at once
history, right, and politics, it is revealed as what is, for Walter
Benjamin, a violent “storm.”11 Unconditional forgiveness is thus
tested against the impossible: it is and must remain exceptional,
beyond either calculus or finality, outside all exchange and
transaction, just like the gift whose logic it shares. Irreducible to
repentance, punishment, retribution, or salvation, forgiveness as
thought by Derrida is similarly inseparable from, and haunted by, the
notion of perjury. It calls into question the inexpiable (Jankélévitch)
as much as reconciliation (Hegel) or ethics itself.

···

This volume reproduces the written seminar text read by Derrida in

the ten sessions that took place at the EHESS in 1997–98. As
always, all the sessions were entirely written out. The Third Session
includes a thirteen-page handwritten manuscript that we deciphered
and transcribed with the invaluable assistance of Marie-Louise
Mallet.12 Unlike the already published volumes of the later series of
EHESS seminars, which were, to a great extent, previously
unpublished—as is the case for The Death Penalty (1999–2001) and
The Beast and the Sovereign (2001–3)—several sessions of “Perjury
and Pardon” had already appeared in print. The First and Second
Sessions appeared in journals or collective works starting in 1999,
whereas other sessions were later used by Derrida in his books, that
being the case for the Fourth Session, which appeared in The Gift of
Death, Second Edition, and Literature in Secret, and for Sessions 7–
10, which were collected under the title “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited
Ink (2)” in Without Alibi, published in French in 2001.13 The “Perjury
and Pardon” seminar allows one to reconstruct the original sequence
of those different texts and to better understand the coherence of
Derrida’s thinking by relating the published work to that developed
“live” in his seminar. The reader is also able in this way to compare
the first version of the texts and the final, published version.
We worked on the basis of the typescript that Derrida used in his
seminar, housed at the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine
(IMEC), the corresponding computer file, and the texts appended to
them (press cuttings, photocopies of quoted passages). Two versions
of the seminar exist. For this edition we used that of the so-called
American seminar, previously housed in the Fonds Jacques Derrida
at IMEC and now held at the Princeton University Library.14 There
were two different versions of the First Session (in two parts in the
computer file): we used the later version, which includes this
mention: “I’ll no doubt end here in Cracow.” There was also an
earlier version of the Fourth Session, but without noteworthy
modification; similarly for the two photocopies of the first page of
the Eighth Session. In addition to the thirteen pages already
mentioned, the typescript includes several handwritten additions,
which we have taken into account unless they relate solely to
Derrida’s improvised translation given for his American audience.
One also finds certain indications concerning the organization of the
American seminar, or relating to omitted passages; we have pointed
to those only when they directly concern the 1997–98 seminar. In
rare cases where differences exist between the typescript and the
computer file (notably at the beginning of the Eighth Session), we
have indicated the same. We also had at our disposal audio
recordings of all ten sessions, which allowed us to monitor any
variations.
As is the case for several of Derrida’s seminars, the present course
also included certain sessions called “restricted” (November 19 and
December 17, 1997; January 21, February 18, and March 18, 1998),
as well as a discussion session (February 4, 1998).15 The final, Tenth
Session of the open seminar took place on March 25, 1998, whereas
the restricted seminar began again on May 13, 1998, following the
“long annual interruption” in April—as Derrida liked to refer to it—
and continued into mid-June with six additional sessions of
presentations, comments by Derrida, and open discussion.16 In
conformity with previously published volumes, the restricted sessions
and discussion sessions have not been transcribed for the present
edition, except for the texts appended to the Sixth Session, which
directly concern the content and comprehension of the seminar. We
have also transcribed a part of the February 4, 1998, discussion
session in which Derrida extemporizes at length in order to mark a
transition in the middle of the seminar and to clarify the abbreviated
remarks made at the beginning of the Sixth Session. We have
similarly transcribed the beginning of the June 3, 1998, session in
which he comments on a news item (Germany had just asked the
victims of the bombing of Guernica for forgiveness). The reader will
find that additional appendix, which announces the second year of
the “Perjury and Pardon” seminar, at the end of this volume. Finally,
we point out that the very last session of the year, on June 17, 1998,
has particular importance, inasmuch as it is the moment when
Derrida announces his “retirement” and explains how the seminar
will operate in subsequent years. He explains, not without humor, in
the passage reproduced here, that he has made a decision that is
“like him,” neither to leave nor to stay:

They call that “retirement”; some say that they are “going
[away, partir] into retirement,” or that they have been “struck”
[atteint] by retirement age, or that . . . who knows, well that is
my case! Which means that, given that in this institution one
can do what one wants, you see [Laughter], one can leave,
disappear, or else stay as before, on the understanding that, all
the same, one’s salary is (that decision is made by the State)
seriously reduced. But as for one’s teaching, one can leave or
stay. Well, I thought for a long time about a decision that
 seemed to suit me, and is like me [me ressemble], and I’ve
decided that I wouldn’t do either one or the other, that I
wouldn’t leave and I wouldn’t stay [Laughter]. And so, between
the two—I’m saying this for those who are potentially interested
in the information—I decided that I would continue while
lightening the load, that is to say by beginning later in the year
and ending earlier in the year. . . . So, next year I won’t begin at
the beginning of November as I usually do, but at the beginning
of December, and I won’t end in June but at Easter. There, as
for the rest, it won’t change, we’ll probably rearrange certain
things, I’ll talk about that with those who come back, with those
who show me their friendship by coming back, or do me that
honor. In December we’ll see how to organize things, but in any
case I’ll keep the same topic: perjury and pardon. We’ll begin in
December and finish at the end of March, beginning of April.

We have verified all quoted extracts and bibliographical references

(they are most often clearly indicated in the typescript in abbreviated
form), and provided any that were lacking. Unless otherwise stated,
all notes are added by the editors. In order to ascertain which
editions were used, we had recourse to the very volumes used by
Derrida, which were assembled in the Princeton Library Special
Collection in 2014, along with the inventory of Derrida’s library in his
house in Ris-Orangis, established by Marie-Joëlle St-Louis Savoie in
2009–11.17 We verified and, where necessary, corrected the text of
passages quoted by Derrida, rectifying silently obvious errors of
transcription, while systematically signaling translations that were
modified by him.18 A certain number of quoted texts were not copied
into the typescript: they exist as direct photocopies from books
(French texts, translations and texts in their original version), with
numerous traces of Derrida’s reading (underlined passages, circled
words, various marginal annotations) that were inserted by him into
the typescript at the place where he intended to read them and
comment on them.
 As with previous published volumes of Derrida’s seminar, we had
recourse to audio recordings of the sessions in order to establish the
precise limits of quoted passages and in order to transcribe notations
intercalated by Derrida during his reading of the typescript. Those
recordings also allowed us to clarify what was in fact said during the
seminar, which doesn’t always correspond exactly to the typescript.
That is the case for the First Session, November 12, 1997, which is
very long, and that of November 26, 1997: Derrida didn’t stop where
he had planned to because of time constraints, and as a result he
modified the end of that session and what followed at the beginning
of the next session. The situation was the same at the end of the
Second Session, November 26, 1997, whose final pages (61–64)
were carried over to the beginning of the session of December 3,
1997, as it appears in the typescript. Such changes have always
been indicated, though we have preserved the priority accorded the
typescript, which is the text published here.
In carefully preserving the orality of this text, we also reproduce
the various pointers that Derrida inscribes in the typescript, including
reminders that he gave himself, such as “(Blackboard),” “slowly,” or
“read and comment,” announcing a quoted passage or an excursus
that he would develop extemporaneously. Where possible, we have
transcribed the content of significant such additions in notes
reconstructed on the basis of the audio recordings.
As with previously published volumes of the seminar, we have
tried to reduce as much as possible our modifications of the
typescript. The text of the seminar is complete. Whenever changes
were deemed necessary for reasons of comprehension, we have
systematically signaled each of those additions or modifications.
Missing words are inserted between chevrons (also called angle
brackets). Remaining typographical errors, sometimes corrected by
Derrida as he read the script, have been corrected. Other variations,
such as between Rousseau’s “Reveries” and “Promenades,” have
been preserved; names indicated by initials only have been
reconstituted. Finally, Derrida had the habit of noting telegraphically,
at the end of a session, questions that he planned to take up at the
beginning of the following session. We have not reproduced those
notes, save for one that is entirely written out at the end of the Fifth
Session, and which provides clarification concerning the general
argumentation of the seminar.

···

We offer warm thanks to Marie-Louise Mallet for her help in

deciphering the handwritten pages of the Third Session, and the
preliminary organization of the Fourth Session; Georges Leroux for
revision of Greek terms; Jean-Jacques Lavoie for checking the
Hebrew; Eduardo Cadava for assisting Nicholas Cotton’s research at
the Firestone Library at Princeton; and Nino Gabrielli for his help in
researching certain biblical sources.
We thank all those who helped us locate the audio recordings of
the two years of the seminar, which turned out to be a difficult task:
Eric Prenowitz, who generously made available recordings of some
sessions; Cécile Bourguignon, editor at Éditions Galilée, who also
provided us with recordings of sessions; François Borde, research
delegate, and André Derval, director of collections, at IMEC; and
Peggy Kamuf and Derek Quezada (outreach and public services
librarian, Special Collections and Archives, University of California,
Irvine), who oversaw the electronic transfer of certain recordings.
The recordings held at IMEC and at Irvine were not always
complete; we were able to fill in those gaps thanks to the valuable
assistance of Yuji Nishiyama, professor at Tokyo Metropolitan
University and Japanese translator of Derrida’s seminars, who put us
in touch with Makoto Asari, former professor at the University of
Bordeaux-Montaigne, and with Takaaki Morinaka, professor at
Waseda University, who had collected the recordings in Japan. We
also thank all our colleagues on the editorial team, and most
especially Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas, and David Wills, for
their close rereading of our work.
Finally, and especially, we thank Marguerite Derrida, Jean Derrida,
and Pierre Alferi for their confidence in and support for the project
from the beginning.

Ginette Michaud and Nicholas Cotton

 TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

An obvious question for the translator of this seminar is posed by the

words of its title. French has a single word, le pardon, and its
cognates (pardonner, etc.), for the different usages of “forgiveness”
and “pardon” in English, even if they coincide in a case such as
“pardon me [pardon]” for either “sorry” or “excuse me.” In general, I
have translated the French noun, le pardon, as “forgiveness,”
retaining “pardon” for more specific instances, such as a political or
divine act of clemency. If one listens to recorded material where
Derrida speaks in English about the topic(s) of this seminar, he
almost invariably uses “forgiveness.” A similar set of questions
concerns the word parjure, as indicated below. Therefore, because
Derrida’s discussion in the seminar ranges over differences between
French and English, as well as between pardon and excuse, pardon
and grace or mercy, lying and perjury, and so on, it is not necessary
to detail here all of the nuances that will progressively emerge in
what follows.
For reasons that are in part explained by comments made in the
preceding Editors’ Note, concerning Derrida’s emphasis on the
constitutive structure of the “negative” term, I have chosen to keep
the transliteration of Derrida’s French title: “Perjury and Pardon.” The
most palatable alternative would have been “Lying and Forgiveness,”
and my consistent recourse to “forgiveness” rather than “pardon” as
the general term throughout the seminar would seem to militate in
favor of that more informal translation. Furthermore, translating
pardonner as “forgive” transliterally places the question of the
seminar within the context of the gift, which, one could argue, is
inscribed—beginning in the late 1970s, or even much earlier—as the
paradigm for the aporetic structure of the impossible that remains
Derrida’s interest throughout the whole series that, from 1991 to
2003, he entitles “Questions of Responsibility.”
Why, then, opt for “Perjury and Pardon”? First, for the rhetorical
symmetry it affords, like parjure/pardon in French. Second, for the
overlap of religious, political, and legal terms allowed by “pardon” in
English. But third, and perhaps most important, as Derrida often
underscores here, le parjure is not simply “lying” in the sense of
stating a falsehood (French mensonge also does that work). Parjure
emphasizes the more legalistic sense of going back on one’s formal
oath, as instantiated by “perjury” in English and as instantiated
historically by the example that made headlines in the second year
of the seminar, namely, the accusation that brought about President
Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1999. There emerged, therefore, a type
of historical vindication of Derrida’s title: on the one hand, a series of
revisitings of past wrongs, such as apartheid, with or without
apology or forgiveness for them, and, on the other hand, the
political staging of a particular American event of perjury that came
to close out the post–World War II epoch, indeed the millennium.
The intersecting histories of French and English mean that the
verb parjurer echoes within the semantic field of our now outdated
“forswear,” which would also provide a tidy parallel to “forgive.” The
title could therefore have been translated as “Forswearing and
Forgiving,” and that choice would have had the advantage of
foregrounding the two important resonances just mentioned,
namely, jurer, “to swear” or “take an oath,” and donner, “to give.”
However, rather than revert to what seems to me a distracting
anachronistic choice, I have made the choice to transliterate the
French: Perjury and Pardon.

···

The preceding Editors’ Note contains a paragraph (not included here,

p. 21 in the Seuil edition) explaining the editors’ respect—wherever
possible without creating confusion—for Derrida’s paragraph breaks;
length of sentences; punctuation; use of brackets, parentheses, and
dashes; use of italics, and so on. In the transition from French to
English usage, those practices have not always been preserved. For
example, French systematically begins a new paragraph following an
indented quotation, which is not necessarily the case in English;
French is more liberal with sentence fragments than is formal
English; and contemporary English is less tolerant of very long
sentences than is French. The translation necessarily reflects those
language differences. Except where it would be misleading, I have
followed Derrida’s common use of parentheses rather than brackets
for a gloss or foreign word inserted in a quote. In general, brackets
indicate either a longer interpolation made by Derrida within a
quotation, or, following usual practice, my own inclusion of the
French for reasons of clarity.
A special challenge arises when Derrida switches among an
existing French translation of a text that he is quoting, its original
German, say, and his own translation of that original. Given that the
practice here is to quote from existing English translations, those
shifts could not always be conveyed. I have nevertheless tried where
possible to give the sense of his reading practice and strategy.

···

I wish to record my debt of gratitude to the following colleagues and

student participants at the Derrida Seminars Translation Project
Workshop, held at IMEC in July 2019, for their invaluable assistance
in the preparation of this volume: Eric Aldieri, Matías Bascuñán,
Geoffrey Bennington, Pascale-Anne Brault, Ellen Burt, Nicholas
Cotton, Edwige Crucifix, Simon Gissinger, Peggy Kamuf, Andrew
Kingston, Kir Kuiken, Bryan Maddox, Ginette Michaud, Michael Naas,
Bradley Ramos, and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Special additional thanks
are due to Kir Kuiken for the use of his splendid library (and to
Vesna Bogojević for attendant hospitality), and to Ginette Michaud
and Nicholas Cotton for their generous assistance in answering my
queries.

···
Editions used by Derrida are identified at the point of their first
reference, preceded by, in almost all cases, the English translation I
have relied on. For texts used repeatedly, page references thereafter
are given in the main text, separated by a slash. The first page
reference is to the quoted source (that is, usually the English text),
the second to the original.
Where Derrida provides page references in his typescript, I have
refrained from repeating the information following the quoted
passage unless the reader might be confused. In such cases Derrida
sometimes adds letters or numbers, or both, presumably as a
notation system for locating quotations in his own copy of the text. I
have simply repeated those notations in the form in which they
appear.
 FIRST SESSION
November 12, 1997

1
Pardon, yes, sorry [pardon].
I just said pardon, in French.2
You don’t understand anything by this for the moment, no doubt.
Pardon.
It’s a word, pardon, this word is a noun: one says un pardon, le
pardon. In the French language it is a noun. One can find its
homonymic equivalent, more or less in the same state, with more or
less the same meaning and with usages that are at least analogous,
in other languages, English for example (“pardon,” in certain
contexts that we’ll clarify when the time comes), although the word
is, if not Latin, at least, in its tortuous filiation, of Latin origin
(perdon in Spanish, perdâo in Portuguese, perdono in Italian). In the
Latin origin of this word, and in too complex a way for us to tackle it
head-on today, one finds a reference to the “gift [don],” to donation.
And on more than one occasion we will need to carry over the
problems and aporias of the gift (such as I tried to formalize, for
example, in Given Time, and notably in the final chapter of that
book, entitled “Excuse and Forgiveness [Pardon]”),3 to transfer
them, so to speak, onto problems and onto these nonproblems that
aporias of forgiveness constitute, aporias that are analogous and,
moreoever, linked. But one must neither yield to these analogies
between the gift and forgiveness nor, of course, neglect their
necessity; rather, one must attempt to articulate the two, to follow
them to the point where, all of a sudden, they cease being pertinent.
Between giving and forgiving there is at least this affinity or this
alliance according to which, beside their being unconditional on
principle—one and the other, giving and forgiving, giving for giving
[don par don]—they have an essential relation to time, to the
movement of temporalization; even though what seems to bind
forgiveness to a past, which in a certain way does not pass, makes
forgiveness an experience irreducible to that of the gift, to a gift that
is attributed more commonly to the present, to the presentation or
presence of the present.
I just said “experience” of forgiveness or the gift, but the word
“experience” may already seem badly or precipitately used, in that
forgiveness and gift have perhaps this in common, that they never
present themselves as such to what is normally called an experience,
a presentation to consciousness or to existence, precisely because of
the aporias that we’ll be required to take into account; and for
example—to limit myself to this for the time being—the aporia that
renders me incapable of giving enough, or of being hospitable
enough (here I’m linking things to the seminar of previous years),4
of being present enough to the present that I give, and to the
welcome that I offer, such that I think—I am even certain of this—
that I always have to be forgiven, to ask forgiveness for not giving,
for never giving enough, for never offering or welcoming enough.
One is always guilty, one must always be forgiven when it comes to
the gift. And the aporia gets more serious when one becomes
conscious of the fact that if one has to ask forgiveness for not
giving, for never giving enough, one may also feel guilty and so have
to ask forgiveness, on the contrary, for giving, forgiveness for what
one gives, which can become a poison, a weapon, an affirmation of
sovereignty or even omnipotence, or an appeal for recognition.5 One
always takes in giving: we have, in the past, insisted at length on
that logic of giving-taking.6 One must therefore ask, a priori, for
forgiveness for the gift itself, one has to be forgiven for the gift, for
the sovereignty or desire for sovereignty of the gift. And, pushing it
further, irresistibly, to the second degree, one would even have to be
forgiven forgiveness, which itself also risks involving the irreducible
ambiguity of an affirmation of sovereignty, indeed of mastery.
Those are the abysses that await us and for which we’ll always be
on the lookout, not as accidents to avoid but as the very ground, the
groundless ground of the very thing called gift or forgiveness. So, no
gift without forgiveness, and no forgiveness without gift, but the two
are not, above all, the same thing. The verbal link between don and
pardon, which is marked in Latinate languages but not in Greek, for
example, as far as I know (and we will have to ask ourselves about
the apparent presence or absence of forgiveness in the strict sense
in ancient Greek culture, an enormous and delicate question), this
verbal link between don and pardon is also present in English and
German: in English, “to forgive,” “forgiveness,” “asking for
forgiveness,” and one will contrast “to give” and “to get” (that
extraordinary word in English to which one would have to devote
years of seminar) in “to forgive” versus “to forget”7 (forgiving is not
forgetting, another enormous problem); in German, although
verzeihen is more common—Verzeihung, jenen um Verzeihung
bitten: to ask someone for forgiveness—and this is the word Hegel
uses in The Phenomenology of Spirit (we’ll return to that),8 although
one often uses Entschuldigung (more in the sense of an excuse, and
entschuldbar in the equivocal sense of the forgivable-excusable,
literally de-culpabilizable, relieved of, exonerated from a debt that
has been remitted). There is nonetheless a word in German, a lexical
family that maintains this link between the gift and forgiveness:
vergeben means “to forgive,” ich bitte um Vergebung, “I ask for
forgiveness,” but its usage is generally reserved for solemn, even
religious or spiritual occasions, less everyday usages than verzeihen
or entschuldigen. This link between usages of the word pardon, so-
called common, everyday, casual usages, on the one hand (for
example when I say “pardon (me)” when I have to pass in front of
someone as I get out of the elevator), and, <on the other hand,>
the serious, considered, intense usages, this link between all types
of usages in very different situations, this link will be one of our
problems, both a semantic problem concerning the concept of
forgiveness and a pragmatic problem concerning the acts of
language or pre- or ultra-linguistic behavior. More frequently—but
that frequency and probability is precisely a question of pragmatics,
of context and social gesture—more foreseeably, then, Verbegung
has rather the religious sense (in this case Biblio-Koranic, therefore)
of remission of sins, even though the usage of this lexical family
(vergeben, Vergebung, Vergabe) is both flexible and perverse:
vergeben can mean a misdeal [maldonne], corruption of the gift,
sich etwas vergeben: “to be compromised,” and Vergabe is the
contract awarded, a tender . . .9
Pardon: pardon is a noun. It can sometimes be preceded by a
definite or indefinite article (le pardon, un pardon) and inscribed, for
example as subject, in a constative sentence: pardon is this or that,
forgiveness [le pardon] has been asked by someone or by an
institution, a pardon has been granted or refused, etc. The
forgiveness asked by the Conference of Bishops, by the police, by
the medical profession, forgiveness that the university or the Vatican
has not yet asked for, etc. That is the noun as reference of a
constative—or theoretical—type.10 One can devote a seminar to the
question of forgiveness, which is basically what we are getting ready
to do (forgiveness then becomes, to that extent, the name of a
theme or of a theoretical problem, to be dealt with within a horizon
of knowledge), unless the seminar’s actors request or grant
forgiveness by treating of it theoretically. And when I opened this
seminar by saying pardon, you weren’t to know, you still don’t know,
what I was doing, whether I was begging your pardon or whether,
instead of using the word, I was mentioning the noun pardon as the
title of the seminar. For in the single word pardon, with or without an
exclamation mark, one may—although nothing constrains one to do
so if a context does not require it—already hear an entire sentence
implied in it, a performative sentence: “Sorry! I beg your pardon, I
beg you [vous prie] to pardon me, I beg you [te prie] to pardon me,
pardon me, I beg you [pardonnez-moi, je vous prie, pardonne-moi,
je t’en prie].”
I am already marking, I have just marked it as if in passing,
beginning with a long digression in parentheses, this distinction
between tu and vous in order to situate or announce a question that
will long remain suspended, but on which everything will no doubt
also hang: if the “you” is not a vous of respect or distance, like the
vous that Levinas says is preferable to Buber’s tu, which signifies too
much proximity or familiarity, even fusion, and risks canceling the
infinite transcendence of the other; if, therefore, the “you” of “I beg
your pardon,” “pardonnez-moi” is a collective and plural “you,” the
question then becomes one of a collective pardon, whether that
concern a group of subjects, others, citizens, individuals, etc., or
whether it already involve—and this is even more complicated, but
with a complication that is at the heart of pardon—a multiplicity of
instances or moments, instances or instants, of “I”s inside the “I.”
Who forgives or who asks whom for forgiveness, at what moment?
Who has the right or power to do that, “who forgives whom?” And
what does the “who” signify here? That will always be the almost
ultimate form of the question, most often of a question by definition
insoluble. For however formidable it be, that question is perhaps not
the ultimate question. More than once we will be faced with the
effect of a prerequisite question, prior to this one, the question
“who” or “what”? Does one forgive someone for a wrong committed,
for example a perjury (but, as I will try to argue later, a fault, an
offense, a harm, a wrong committed is in a certain sense always a
perjury), does one forgive someone, or does one forgive someone
something, someone who, in whichever way, can never totally be
confused with the wrongdoing and the moment of the past
wrongdoing, nor even with the past in general?11 This question
—“who” or “what”—won’t stop coming back to haunt, to obsess the
language of forgiveness, in many forms, and not only by multiplying
the aporetic difficulties but also by obliging us finally to suspect or
suspend the meaning of this opposition between “who” and “what,”
a little as if the experience of forgiveness (of forgiveness requested,
wished for, whether granted or not), as if, perhaps, the impossibility
of a true, appropriate, appropriable experience of “forgiveness”
meant the dismissal of this opposition between “who” and “what,” its
dismissal and therefore its history, its past historicity.
But between the pardon in pardonne-moi and the pardon in
pardonnez-moi or in “forgive us” (singular/familiar or plural/formal)
(four possibilities that are essentially different, four distributions
[donnes] of forgiveness between singular and plural that would have
to be multiplied by all the alternatives of “who” and “what”—that
makes a lot), the most overwhelming, most easily identifiable form
of that formidable question today—and it’s where we’ll begin—would
be that of a singular plural.12 Can one, does one have the right, does
it conform to the sense of forgiveness to ask forgiveness of more
than one, of a group, a collectivity, a community? Is it possible to
request forgiveness of or grant forgiveness to an other other than
the singular other, for a crime or wrong that is singular? We have
there one of the first aporias within which we will continually find
ourselves caught.
In a certain manner it seems to us that forgiveness can be
requested or granted only “one on one,” face to face—so to speak—
between the one who has committed the irreparable or irreversible
harm and the one who is subjected to it. Only the latter is able to
hear the request for forgiveness, and grant or refuse it. That solitude
of two, in the scene of forgiveness, would seem to deprive of sense
or authenticity any forgiveness that is requested collectively, in the
name of a community, a church, an institution, a corporation, a
group of anonymous victims, possibly dead, or their representatives,
descendants, or survivors. In the same way, this singular, or even
almost secret, solitude of forgiveness would make it an experience
that is foreign to the domain of law, punishment, or penance, of
public institutions, judicial calculus, etc.13 As Vladimir Jankélévitch
precisely recalls in Forgiveness, “forgiveness of sin is a defiance of
penal logic.”14 Inasmuch as forgiveness exceeds penal logic, it is
foreign to all juridical space, even that within which the concept of
crime against humanity emerged following World War II, and, in
1964, the French law concerning the “imprescriptibility”15 of crimes
against humanity. The imprescriptible is not the unforgivable, and I
point very quickly, too quickly here to a critical and problematic place
that we will (supposedly) be constantly coming back to. For all public
declarations of repentance of which there are today more and more
examples in France (the French Catholic church, police or medical
corporations, not yet the Vatican itself, or the university, despite
several cases reported in that context), declarations that had been
preceded by certain analogous gestures in other countries, at
different speeds and in different forms (for example the Japanese
prime minister <Ryutaro Hashimoto>,16 or Vaclav Havel presenting
their apologies to certain victims of the past, the bishops of Poland
and Germany undertaking an examination of conscience on the
occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz).17
All those public demonstrations of repentance, by the state or not,
most often “asking for forgiveness,” which are very new
demonstrations in political history, operate against the historical and
juridical background that brought about the institution, invention,
and foundation of a juridical concept coming out of the Nuremberg
trials of 1945, a concept hitherto unknown, that of “crime against
humanity.” Be that as it may, the concept of forgiveness, or of the
unforgivable, which is often foregrounded in all these discourses and
in the commentaries on them, remains heterogeneous to that
judicial or penal dimension that regulates both the time of
prescription and the imprescriptibility of the crimes.18 Unless it be
that the nonjuridical dimension of forgiveness, and of the
unforgivable, to the extent that it comes to suspend or interrupt the
usual order of the law, comes to be inscribed, or to inscribe its
interruption in the law itself. That is one of the difficulties awaiting
us.19
The little book by Jankélévitch that came out after Forgiveness,
entitled L’Imprescriptible, has as its epigraph these lines from Éluard,
which make the paradoxical, and to my mind usefully provocative,
point of opposing salvation, but salvation on earth, and forgiveness.
Éluard says:

There is no salvation on earth

As long as one can forgive executioners.20

Inasmuch as it almost always happens, and in a nonfortuitous

way, that one associates—we will often return to this—expiation,
salvation, redemption, and reconciliation with forgiveness, these
words at least have the merit of breaking with common sense, which
is also that of the greatest religious and spiritual traditions of
forgiveness—the Judaic or Christian traditions, for example—which
never remove forgiveness from the horizon of reconciliation, hope
for redemption and salvation, through avowal, remorse or
repentance, sacrifice and expiation. In L’Imprescriptible, starting
from the foreword to the text entitled “Pardonner? [To forgive?]” a
foreword that dates from 1971, Jankélévitch in fact himself gives in,
without saying it in these terms, to a kind of repentance, since he
admits that this text seems to contradict what he had written four
years earlier in the 1967 book, Forgiveness.21 In addition, the short
polemical essay “Pardonner?” was written in the context of French
debates in 1964 concerning the imprescriptibility of Hitler’s crimes
and crimes against humanity. As Jankélévitch makes clear:

In Le Pardon, a purely philosophical work that I have published

elsewhere, the answer to the question, Must we pardon? seems
to contradict the one given here. Between the absolute of the
law of love and the absolute of vicious liberty there is a tear that
cannot be entirely picked apart [décousue] [does he mean
recousue (resewn)? Unless knowing how to pick apart a tear
already be a way of conceiving of it as faulty stitching, a
previous sewing that is therefore open to a certain re-sewing, to
being re-seamed, darned, something Jankélévitch contests
here]. I have not attempted to reconcile the irrationality of evil
with the omnipotence of love. Forgiveness is as strong as evil,
but evil is as strong as forgiveness. (“Pardon Them?” 553 /
Imprescriptible, 14–15)

Naturally, these are statements and a logic that we have barely

begun to debate, with which we are just beginning to struggle.
Nonetheless, the texts of L’Imprescriptible, participating as they do
in the debate over imprescriptibility that I have just evoked, and to
which we will return, firmly conclude with the impossibility and
inopportuneness, indeed the immorality of forgiveness. And in order
to do so, in this polemical and impassioned debate, they produce a
continuity of meanings that we must rigorously dissociate, and
which, moreover, Jankélévitch himself dissociates in what he calls his
“purely philosophical work,” namely, for example, forgiveness,
prescribed limitation, and forgetting. “Should We Pardon Them?”
begins with this question: “Is it time to forgive, or at least to
forget?” (553/17). Jankélévitch well knows that forgiving is not
forgetting, but in the spirit of a broad polemical demonstration, and
in abject fear of the risk of a forgiveness that would end up
engendering a forgetting, Jankélévitch says no to forgiveness by
contending that one must not forget. He speaks to us, in short, of a
duty of nonforgiveness, in the name of the victims. Forgiveness is
impossible. And it must not be done. One must not forgive. One is
required not to forgive. We will have to ask ourselves, again and
again, what this “impossible” might mean, and whether the
possibility of forgiveness, if there be such a thing, is not to be
measured precisely against the ordeal of the impossible. Impossible,
Jankélévitch tells us in short, forgiveness for what happened in the
death camps is impossible. “Forgiveness,” says Jankélévitch, “died in
the death camps” (567/50).
Among all of Jankélévitch’s arguments to which we will, and would
have to return constantly, there are two I would like to emphasize.
They are also two axioms that are far from self-evident.
A. The first is that forgiveness cannot be granted, or at least one
cannot imagine the possibility of granting it, of forgiving, then,
unless forgiveness is asked for, explicitly or implicitly requested, and
this difference is not nothing; which would mean, therefore, that one
will never forgive someone who does not admit their fault, who does
not repent and does not, explicitly or not, request forgiveness. This
link between forgiveness granted and requested does not seem to
me a given, even if here again it seems required by an entire
religious and spiritual tradition of forgiveness—something we’ll come
back to. I wonder whether a rupture in this reciprocity or this
symmetry, whether even the dissociation between forgiveness
requested and forgiveness granted, is not de rigueur for every
forgiveness worthy of the name.
B. The second axiom, whose trace we shall constantly encounter
in many of the texts that we are going to analyze from here on, is
that when the crime is too serious, when it crosses the line of radical
evil, or even of the human, when it becomes monstrous, there can
no longer be any question of forgiveness; forgiveness must remain,
so to speak, between men, on a human scale. That also seems
problematic to me, although it is very powerful and very classical.
Two quotes to support these two axioms.
1.22 The first presupposes a history of forgiveness; it starts from
the end of this history and it dates that end of the history of
forgiveness (we might later say, with Hegel, of history as
forgiveness)23 from the project of extermination of the Jews by the
Nazis. Jankélévitch emphasizes what in his eyes is the absolute
singularity of this project, a project without precedent or analogy, an
absolutely exceptional singularity that would retrospectively allow a
history of forgiveness to be thought. That history would be deployed
and exposed, precisely, on the basis of its final limit: the “final
solution” would be in sum, so to speak, the final solution of a history
and of a historical possibility of forgiveness; all the more so—and the
two arguments are interwoven into the same reasoning—that the
Germans, the German people, if such a thing exists, have never
asked for forgiveness. As Jankélévitch inquires more than once: how
could we forgive someone who does not ask for forgiveness? And
here I would repeat my question, a question that should never stop
echoing in our ears: is forgiveness possible, with its meaning of
forgiveness, only on condition that it be requested?
Here then, before discussing them, are some of the strong tenets
of Jankélévitch’s argument (pp. 50–51 of the original edition of
L’Imprescriptible, same pagination in the “Points” edition):
“Forgiveness! But have they ever asked us for forgiveness? [The
“they” and the “us” would obviously call for being determined and
legitimated]. It is the distress and dereliction of the guilty alone that
would give forgiveness a meaning and a reason for being” (567/50).
 It is thus clear for Jankélévitch—as it is clear for more than one
tradition, those traditions from which an idea of forgiveness in fact
comes to us, but an idea of forgiveness the very legacy of which
conveys a force of implosion whose blasts we will constantly be
registering, a legacy that contradicts itself and gets carried away,
combusts, I would say more dispassionately “deconstructs”—it is
thus clear for Jankélévitch that forgiveness can be granted only if
the guilty party mortifies themself, confesses, repents, accuses
themself in asking for forgiveness, if as a consequence they expiate
and so identify themself, with a view to redemption and
reconciliation, with the one whom they ask for forgiveness. It is this
traditional, certainly very forceful, very constant axiom, that I will be
constantly tempted to contest, in the very name of the same legacy,
of the semantics of one and the same legacy, namely, that in
forgiveness, in the very meaning of forgiveness, there is a force, a
desire, an impetus, a movement, an appeal (call it what you will)
that demands that forgiveness be granted, if it can be, even to
someone who does not ask for it, who neither repents nor
confesses, neither improves nor redeems themself, beyond—as a
consequence—every identificatory, spiritual economy, sublime or not,
beyond all expiation even. But I will leave this suggestion in a virtual
state, we will have to come back to it incessantly, in an incessant
way; I’ll now return to my quotation of this very violent text, as if
carried away by an anger felt to be legitimate, righteous anger:

Forgiveness! But have they ever asked us for forgiveness? It is

the distress and dereliction of the guilty alone that would give
forgiveness a meaning and a reason for being. When the guilty
are fat, well nourished, prosperous, enriched by the “economic
miracle,” forgiveness is a sinister joke. No, forgiveness is not for
swine and their sows. Forgiveness died in the death camps. Our
horror before that which understanding cannot, properly
speaking, conceive of would stifle pity at its birth . . . if the
accused could inspire pity in us. (567/50–51)
 There follow remarks of such polemical violence and such anger
against the Germans that I do not even want to have to read them
or cite them. It is only just to recognize that Jankélévitch himself
was somewhat aware that this violence is unjust and unworthy of
what Jankélévitch has elsewhere written on forgiveness. He knew he
was letting himself get carried away, in a guilty way, by anger and
indignation, even if that anger gave itself an air of righteous anger.
That he was aware of it comes through, for example, in an interview
he gave several years later, in 1977 (it is quoted by Alain Gouhier in
an article on “The Time of the Unforgivable and the Time of
Forgiveness according to Jankélévitch,” published in the proceedings
of a remarkable conference dedicated to forgiveness). Jankélévitch
writes the following, which I quote, on the one hand, in order to
note an expression that might well serve as the title of what I am
trying to do here (namely, a “hyperbolical ethics,” or even an ethics
beyond ethics) and, on the other hand, in order to underline the
more or less guilty tension that, along with Jankélévitch, we must
admit to and try to be forgiven for, a tension or a contradiction
between the hyperbolical ethics that tends to push exigency to the
limit and beyond the limit of the possible and this everyday economy
of forgiveness that dominates the religious, juridical, even political
and psychological semantics of forgiveness, a forgiveness contained
within the human or anthropo-theological limits of repentance,
confession, expiation, reconciliation, or redemption. Jankélévitch
says this; he admits this:

I have written two books on forgiveness: one of them, simple,

very aggressive, very polemical [pamphlétaire], whose title is
“Should We Pardon Them?” [that’s the one I just quoted from],
and the other, Forgiveness, a book of philosophy in which I
study forgiveness in itself, from the point of view of Christian
and Jewish ethics. I draw out an ethics that could be qualified
as hyperbolic [my emphasis], for which forgiveness is the
supreme commandment; and, on the other hand, evil always
appears as beyond. Forgiveness is stronger than evil, and evil is
 stronger than forgiveness. I can’t find a way out of that. It is a
kind of oscillation that in philosophy one would describe as
dialectical, and which seems infinite to me. I believe in the
immensity of forgiveness, in its supernaturality; I think I have
said that often enough, perhaps dangerously, and on the other
hand, I believe in wickedness [méchanceté].24

It is obvious that the passage I just read on the finite history of

forgiveness, on the death of forgiveness in the death camps, on
forgiveness not being for animals or for those who do not ask for it,
that this passage obeys the so-called polemical [pamphlétaire] logic,
which the logic of a hyperbolical ethics resists, and resists infinitely,
a hyperbolical ethics that for its part would precisely command, on
the contrary, that forgiveness be granted where it is neither
requested nor deserved, and even for the worst radical evil,
forgiveness acquiring its sense and possibility as forgiveness only
where it is called on to do the im-possible and to forgive the un-
forgivable.25 But this polemical logic is not only a logic of
circumstance; we must take it all the more seriously and pay it
careful attention because it picks up on the strongest, the most
strongly traditional, logic of the religious and spiritualist semantics of
forgiveness, which aligns it with repentance, confession, a request
for forgiveness, the capacity to expiate, to redeem oneself, and so
on. Indeed, one of the great difficulties that awaits us derives from
the fact that the hyperbolical ethics, which will also guide us, both
follows in the wake of that tradition and is incompatible with it, as if
the tradition itself carried in its heart an inconsistency, a virtual
power of implosion or auto-deconstruction, a power of the
impossible—and that will require of us once again the strength to re-
think what is meant by the possibility of the im-possible or the im-
possibility of the possible. In fact, wherever we find the un-
forgivable as inexpiable, wherever, as Jankélévitch indeed concludes,
forgiveness becomes impossible, and the history of forgiveness
comes to an end, we will ask ourselves whether, paradoxically, the
possibility of forgiveness as such, if there is such a thing, doesn’t
find its origin, whether forgiveness doesn’t begin in the place where
it appears to end, where it appears im-possible, precisely at the end
of the history of forgiveness, of history as history of forgiveness.
More than once we would have to put this formally empty and blunt,
but implacably demanding aporia to the test, the aporia according to
which forgiveness, if there is such a thing, must and can forgive only
the un-forgivable, the inexpiable, and so do the impossible. To
forgive the forgivable, the venial, the excusable, what one can
always forgive, is not to forgive. Yet the nerve center of
Jankélévitch’s argument in L’Imprescriptible, and in the section of
L’Imprescriptible entitled “Should We Pardon Them?” is that the
singularity of the Shoah attains the dimensions of the inexpiable;
and that for the inexpiable there is no possible forgiveness, or even
a forgiveness that would have a sense, that would make sense
(because the common axiom of the tradition, finally, and that of
Jankélévitch, the axiom we will perhaps have to call into question, is
that forgiveness must still have a sense, and that this sense must be
determined on the basis of salvation, reconciliation, redemption,
expiation, I would even say of sacrifice).
Indeed, Jankélévitch previously declared that in the case of the
Shoah: “[o]ne cannot punish the criminal with a punishment
proportionate to his crime, for in relation to the infinite all finite
magnitudes tend to be equal, in such a way that the penalty
becomes almost indifferent; what happened is literally inexpiable.
One no longer even knows whom to put the blame on or whom to
accuse” (558/29). Jankélévitch seems to assume, then, like so many
others, like Hannah Arendt for example (in a passage from The
Human Condition, p. 241; Condition de l’homme moderne, p. 307),
that forgiveness, as a human thing—I insist on this anthropological
trait, which determines everything (for it will always be a matter of
knowing whether forgiveness is a human thing or not)—is always a
correlate of the possibility of punishing; not of taking revenge, of
course, which is something else, to which forgiveness is alien, she
says, but of punishing. And, I quote:
 The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is
punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put
an end to something that without interference could go on
endlessly. It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in
the realm of human affairs that men are unable to forgive what
they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has
turned out to be unforgivable.26

In L’Imprescriptible, then, but not in Forgiveness, Jankélévitch

situates himself within this correlation, this proportionality, this
symmetry, this common measure between the possibilities of
punishing and forgiving, declaring that forgiveness no longer has a
sense wherever the crime, like the Shoah, has become “inexpiable,”
disproportionate, out of proportion to any human measure. Indeed,
he writes: “Properly speaking, the grandiose massacre [the Shoah,
the “final solution”] is not a crime on a human scale any more than
are astronomical magnitudes and light years. Thus, the reactions
that it inspires are in the first place despair and a feeling of
powerlessness before the irreparable” (558/29, Derrida’s emphasis).
[The irreparable: interrupting my quote, I underline this word for
three reasons:
1. First reason. “Irreparable” will be Chirac’s word, in a text we’ll
come back to, for describing the crime against the Jews under Vichy
(“France . . . on that day,” he declared, “committed the
irreparable”).27
>2. Second reason to underline “irreparable.” We will have to ask
ourselves whether the irreparable means the unforgivable; I think
not, no more than does the “imprescriptible,” a juridical notion,
belong to the order of forgiveness and mean the unforgivable.
Everything must therefore be done to discern as subtly and as
rigorously as possible the unforgivable on the one hand from the
imprescriptible on the other, but also among all the related and
different notions that are the irreparable, the indelible [ineffaçable],
the irreversible, the unforgettable, the irrevocable, the inexpiable. All
of these notions, in spite of the decisive differences that separate
them, have in common a negativity, a “[do] not,” the “[do] not” of
an impossible that sometimes, or at the same time, signifies
“impossible because one cannot,” “impossible because one must
not.” But in all cases, one must not and/or cannot go back over a
past. The past is past, the event took place, the wrong took place,
and that past, the memory of that past, remains irreducible,
intractable. That is one of the differences between forgiveness and
the gift, which does not, in principle, concern the past. One will
never have treated forgiveness if one does not take account of this
being-past, a being-past that never lets itself be reduced, modified,
modalized in a present past or a presentable or representable past.
It is a being-past that does not pass, so to speak. It is this im-
passibility, this im-passivity of the past as well, and of the past event
that takes on different forms—which we would have to analyze
relentlessly—the forms of the irreversible, the unforgettable, the
indelible, the irreparable, the irremediable, the irrevocable, the
inexpiable, and so on. Without this stubborn privileging of the past
in constituting temporalization, there is no original problematic of
forgiveness. That is, unless the desire and the promise of
forgiveness, indeed of reconciliation and redemption, were to
secretly signify such a revolt or revolution against a temporalization,
or even against a historicization that makes sense only by taking into
account this essence of the past, this being of the being-past, this
Gewesenheit, this essence of the having been as the very essence of
being; but also this eventness of being, the “it has been” [“ça a été
”] thus, “it happened” [“c’est arrivé ”]. Within that horizon we would
have to reread all the thinking, which, like that of Hegel or,
differently, of Levinas (and, in Levinas, differently at different
moments of his trajectory), makes the experience of forgiveness, of
being-forgiven, of forgiving-one-another, of the becoming-reconciled,
so to speak, an essential and onto-logical (not only ethical or
religious) structure of temporal constitution, the very movement of
subjective and intersubjective experience, the relation to self as a
relation to the other as temporal experience. Forgiveness,
forgivenness [la pardonnéité], is time, the being of time insofar as it
carries with it the indisputable and the unmodifiable past. But this
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
When the old man told his son about Látkakáwas, the young man
said: “There is no use of my going there. If all the others have failed I
should fail, too.”

“You are as blue and nice to look at as Látkakáwas is,” said his
father; “maybe she will like you and take you for a husband.”

The old man took his son out of the underground place, washed him
and got him ready, made him clothes from a wonderful cap, a cap
that could never be destroyed. When the [3]young man put on those
clothes, he was beautiful beyond anything in the world; he was blue
and gold and green, like the clouds in the sky. He could run in the air
and under the ground. He had great power.

When he was ready to start, his father said to him: “When the sun
comes to the edge of the sky, Látkakáwas shakes herself and goes
to the top of the house to watch it. If you travel under the ground you
will get near her before she sees you.”

When Látkakáwas shook herself and stood on top of the house to

watch the sun, the young man was near by, under the ground, with
one eye looking out. She knew that he was there, but she didn’t
change to an old woman. She said to herself: “This man pleases me;
he is not like the others. He is the first man who hasn’t laughed and
made fun of me.”

The young man watched Látkakáwas for a time and then went
home.

When Látkakáwas’ brothers came, she said: “A young man, all blue
and gold and green, nice to look at, has been here to watch me, but
he didn’t make fun of me as the others did.”
The eldest brother said: “We will move to the island to-morrow. Just
at sundown we caught two big salmon; we will go early and dress
them, then we’ll come for you. While we are gone, you must pack up
the beads and skins.”

In the morning, before it was light, the brothers started for the island.
Just as the sun looked up over the edge of the sky, the young man
from the west came again. As Látkakáwas shook herself and came
out at the smoke hole on top of the house, a light shone in her face.
It was so strong that it dazzled her and she turned back. The young
man was brighter than before, for he was out of the ground.

When Látkakáwas went into the house, he peeped through a crack

and watched her. She knew he was there, but she didn’t turn old;
she sat down and assorted her beads according to color. Then she
picked up her mats and got ready to go to the island.

Early in the forenoon the five brothers came and began to pull down
the house. [4]

The people on the west side of the lake saw them at work and asked
one another: “Where are those brothers going? Why are they pulling
down their house?”

At midday, when the brothers were ready to start, they spread mats
from the house to the canoe, for Látkakáwas to walk on. When she
got into the canoe at the edge of the lake, she forgot all about the
young man, forgot that she had fallen in love with him that morning.

The brothers pushed the canoe to get it into the water, but they
couldn’t move it; the young man was holding it. He was right there by
them, but they didn’t see him. They worked for a long time. Finally he
let go of the canoe, and it started, but he pulled it back. He let them
push it out a second time, and a second time he pulled it back. They
started many times but each time, before they could get out into the
lake, they were back at the shore. They strove in that way till the
middle of the afternoon, then the young man freed the canoe and the
brothers rowed toward the island.

As the canoe went on, the young man swam behind it in the form of
a salmon. He was in love with Látkakáwas, and he wanted to look at
her. She sat in the middle of the canoe with one of her brothers; two
brothers sat at the end of the canoe and two in front.

As they rowed along, one of the brothers saw a beautiful salmon, all
blue and gold and green. He speared it and pulled it into the canoe,
and that moment the salmon turned to a young man; but right away
he died.

Látkakáwas cried and blamed her brothers. She knew the young
man, and she felt badly. The brothers felt badly, too. They went back
to the shore and the next day they put their beads and mats in one
big pile and burned them, together with the young man’s body. When
the pile was burned, there was a bright disk in the ashes. The disk
was as bright as the sun in the heavens. This was the crown of the
young man’s head.

Látkakáwas saw it, and said: “Look, what is that bright thing in the
ashes?”

The brother who had speared the salmon took up the disk, gave it to
Látkakáwas, and said: “Take it to Kumush. He is [5]in his sweat-
house at Nihlaksi. Kumush can bring a man to life if he has only one
hair from his head.”

Látkakáwas put the disk in her bosom, then she gave each of her
brothers a bundle of bone head-scratchers, and said: “If Kumush
doesn’t bring my husband to life, you will never see me again.”
Látkakáwas traveled all day; when night came she camped at
Koáskise, not far from Kumush’s sweat-house.

The next morning, just as the sun came up, Látkakáwas gave birth to
a child, a wonderfully beautiful boy. She strapped the baby on a
board, put the board on her back and went to Kumush’s sweat-
house.

When Kumush asked why she came, she took the disk out of her
bosom, and said: “I want you to bring this to life.”

When Kumush saw the disk, he thought he had never seen anything
that was half as bright and beautiful. Látkakáwas wanted to gather
wood to build a fire in the sweat-house, but Kumush said: “You stay
here; I will get the wood.”

Right away he had a big fire; then he heated stones, and when they
were ready to put in the basket of water, he said to Látkakáwas:
“Take your baby and lie down in the corner; wrap yourself up and
keep still.”

When she was wrapped up tight, Kumush put the hot stones into the
basket, and when the water boiled, he put in the disk. After a little
while the disk came to life, and became the young man again.

When Kumush saw how beautiful the man was, he wanted him to
die, and never come to life again. He thought he would get the disk
and the young man’s beauty. As Kumush wanted, so it was. The
young man died.

When Látkakáwas unwrapped herself and saw that her husband was
dead, she cried, she felt so lonesome. She cried all the time Kumush
was gathering wood to burn the body.
When the body was half consumed, Látkakáwas asked Kumush to
put more wood on the fire. While he was picking up the wood, she
strapped the baby on to the board, put the board on her back and
sprang into the fire. Kumush saw [6]her just in time to snatch the
baby from her back. Látkakáwas and the young man’s body were
burned to ashes.

The baby cried and cried. Kumush called it by every name he could
think of. He called it Wanaga, Lákana, Gailalam-tcaknoles. When he
called it Isilámlĕs, it didn’t cry quite as hard; when he said Isis
Uknóles, it cried only a little; when he said Isis, the child stopped
crying. The name pleased it.

Kumush put the child on the ground and looked in the ashes for the
disk. He found it and was glad, but he didn’t know where to put it. He
put it on his knee, under his arm, on his breast, on his forehead, and
on his shoulders, but it wouldn’t stay anywhere. At last he put it on
the small of his back. The minute he put it there it grew to his body,
and right away he was beautiful and young and bright, the brightest
person in the world. The disk had become a part of him, and he was
the father of Isis, for the disk was the father of Isis.

Then Kumush left Nihlaksi and traveled toward the north. On the
road he kept thinking where he was to hide the baby. At last he hid it
in his knee, where it appeared as a boil. That night he stayed with
two old women who lived in a house at the edge of a village. All night
he groaned and complained of the boil on his knee. In the morning
he asked one of the old women to press the boil.

As soon as she began to press it, she saw bright hair. “What is this?”
asked she.

“I told you that wasn’t a boil,” said the other old woman.
They both pressed, and soon the baby came out. The women
washed the child, wrapped it up in a skin blanket and fed it.

Right away people found out that old man Kumush had a baby and
everybody wanted to know where he got it.

Kumush said: “The earth is kind to me. The earth gave this baby to
me.”

Kumush took Isis and went to live on the southeast side of [7]Tula
Lake, 1 and there he fished and worked and reared Isis.

When Isis was old enough to marry, the Mówatwas, a people from
the south, brought him a woman named Tókwa (mole). A great many
people came with her, for she was a powerful woman, the best
worker in the world.

When the Mówatwas came, Kumush and Isis were at home. Isis was
asleep; he had been fishing, and children were carrying fish from the
canoe to the house. As the Mówatwas came in sight, Gäk saw them
and said to the children: “I wonder where all those people came
from? They will never come here again!”

That minute the Mówatwas and Tókwa turned to stone. Kumush and
Isis turned to stone, too, but their spirits came out and were men
again. Their bodies and the body of Tókwa are at Tula Lake now,
near the bodies of the Mówatwas people, who came with Tókwa.

Kumush took Isis to Lĕklis, 2 where he had a house. Then he said to

him:

“You must be wise, you must be great and powerful and strong. You
must go to the top of Lâniswi and swim in the pond of blue water that
is there. When you get to the pond, you must pile up stones and then
stand and talk to the mountain. Tell it what you think. The mountain
will hear you. Everything in the world will hear you and understand
you. After you have talked to the mountain, you must dive in the
pond. Dive five times to the bottom, and each time drink of the
lowest water. When you come out of the pond, build a fire, warm
yourself and then sleep. If you dream, don’t tell the dream to any
one. When you wake up, start for home. On the road don’t talk to
any one, or drink any water. If you do as I tell you, you will be as
great as I am and do the things that I do. You will live always. You
will be the brightest [8]object in the world. If you endure these things,
you will be able to bear every suffering.”

Isis put on a dress made of the red bark of the teskot tree, and went
to the swimming place on the mountain. At night he piled up stones
till he was sleepy; then he stood by the pond and talked to the
mountain. After that he dived five times in the swimming pond. The
fourth time he felt something big and heavy, but he thought: “My
father does not want me to have riches in this world; he wants me to
have mind.” The fifth time he felt five kinds of gambling sticks and a
large white feather.

He came out of the pond, built a fire and warmed himself; then he lay
down and went to sleep. He dreamed that he saw the gambling
sticks and the feather that he had felt in the water. When he woke
up, he started down the mountain. As soon as he got home, he
began to tell his dream, but Kumush said: “Don’t tell your dream
now. If you were to gamble with some one, then you might tell it.”

After this Kumush sent Isis to Slákkosi, a swimming place in a deep

basin on the top of a mountain. Kumush said: “When you get there,
make a rope of willow bark, tie one end around a tree and the other
around your body, and let yourself down into the whirlpool.”

When Isis got to the top of the mountain, he went five times around
the basin, then he made the rope and let himself down into the
water. He went five times around inside the basin. Five times he saw
a bright house that was nice to look at, and he saw lights burning in
the water. After swimming, he drew himself up and started down the
mountain.

When Isis got home, Kumush sent him to Gewásni, a pond deep
down among the rocks on the summit of Giwásyaina. 3

Kumush said: “Lok and Dásläts used to swim in Gewásni. When you
get to the top of the mountain, you must hold your right hand up and
talk to the mountain; ask it for mind and power. The mountain will
hear you and great thoughts will go in through the top of your head.
When you have talked to [9]Giwásyaina, you can talk all day to other
mountains and not get tired or hoarse.”

When Isis got to the swimming place, he let himself down with a bark
rope, sat on a rock at the edge of the water and washed himself.
Then he drew himself up to the top and lay down. He couldn’t go to
sleep. He went to the place where he stood when he talked to the
mountain, lay down there and tried to sleep, but couldn’t; so he
started for home.

When Kumush saw Isis coming, he washed himself, and used nice
smelling roots; then he took food and went to meet him and fix a
resting place for him.

After Isis had eaten and rested, Kumush said: “I want you to go to
Adáwa. You must go to all the gauwams (swimming places); you will
find something in each one. Adáwa is Lok’s pond. He stays in the
water there. You must swim on the western side.”

When Isis got to the pond, he thought there was a great rock out in
the water. He swam out and stood on it. It was Lok and right away he
began to shake and move. Isis jumped into the water; into the middle
of a terrible whirlpool; the whirlpool was Lok’s medicine. It made Isis’
head feel queer and dizzy. He swam to the western side of the pond,
dived five times, got out of the water and went home.

Kumush said: “Now you must go to old man Mukus. Before Gäk
turned him into a rock Mukus was the greatest gambler in the world.
Around him are many rocks, the men he was gambling with when
Gäk’s word was spoken.”

When Isis started, Kumush put the back of his hand across his
forehead, looked toward the place and talked to Mukus, asking him
to be good to Isis and give him whatever he had to give.

When Isis got to the rock, he stood and waited. After a while old
Mukus asked: “What did you come for?”

Isis made no answer.

Then the old man moved a little, and said: “I heard Kumush talking. I
have nothing but gambling to give,—my work. I will give you that.”

When Isis got home, he lay down. Kumush washed himself, [10]then
gave his son food and drink. The next morning he sent him to get
Tcok, the great gambling medicine.

Kumush said: “Tcok is round and bright, like the sun. If a lazy man
tries to catch it, it will show itself in two or three places at the same
time, and he can’t overtake it; but if a strong man, who has been to
the swimming ponds, follows it, it will let itself be caught.”

Isis went for Tcok, caught it and brought it home. He held it so tightly
in his hand that it burned him, and blistered his hand.

Kumush said: “You must kill Tcok; if you don’t it will get away from
you. You want it, for if a man has it when he is gambling, it gives him
strength.”

When Isis had killed Tcok, Kumush said: “Now you must go to
Káimpeos. On the way you will come to a small pond. Don’t stop
there, for it is a bad place. In Káimpeos there are five Kais; they
belong to the pond.”

When Isis got to Káimpeos, he saw the sun, the moon, the stars and
big fires down under the water. He dived five times; each time he felt
a Kai right near him. Under the arm of the fifth Kai there were
gambling sticks. When Isis came out of the water, he lay down on a
rock and tried to go to sleep, but he couldn’t, so he got up and went
home.

While Isis was gone, Kumush made a sweat-house, and when Isis
returned, he said: “Take off your bark clothes and sweat, then paint
your face and body red and put on buckskin clothes and nice beads.
You have been to all the swimming places, and you might be a big
chief, but I don’t want that. Other people will come and it will be bad
here. We will go away where you can keep all the strength the
mountains and swimming places have given you, where you won’t
get bad and dirty from the earth and people.”

They went to the top of a high mountain and built a house among the
rocks. The house was red and nice to look at. Kumush thought that
people around Tula Lake would see his house, but couldn’t climb up
to it. Kumush had the north side, Isis the south side of the house; the
door opened toward the east. [11]

Kumush didn’t know that Skakas and Nada lived on that mountain,
but they did, and both of them fell in love with Isis. They came to the
house and neither one of them would go away.

“What do you want?” asked Kumush.

“I want Isis for a husband,” said Skakas. Nada gave the same
answer.

“Well,” said Kumush, “I will find out what you can do. Which of you
can bring water first from that lake down there?”

Both started. Skakas found water on the way, turned around and
was back first. When Nada came, she said to Skakas: “I didn’t see
you at the lake.”

“I got there first; I took some water and came back. We were not
there at the same time.”

“I am a fast traveler,” said Nada. “It is strange that you got back first.”

Isis drank the water Nada brought, but wouldn’t touch the water
Skakas gave him.

Nada said: “We will go again. This time we will take hold of hands.”
They started in the morning, got the water and Nada flew back.
Skakas didn’t get back till midday.

Isis drank the water Nada brought, and said it was good, but he
wouldn’t drink the water Skakas brought. Kumush tore Skakas in
pieces and threw the pieces over the cliff into the lake. The pieces
are in the lake now; they became rocks.

Isis and Kumush didn’t want to live where people could come, so
they left their home and traveled toward the northeast. Not far from
the house they put down their baskets, fish-spears, canoes and
everything they had used in fishing. Those things turned to stone
and are there on the cliff to-day. Kumush and Isis traveled for a long
time before they came to the river that is now called Lost River.
Kumush made a basket and caught a salmon in it. Then he said: “I
want salmon always to be in this river, and many of them, so people
will have plenty to eat.” At Nusâltgăga he made a basket and caught
small fish, and said the same thing, so that there [12]should always
be plenty of small fish in the river. He multiplied the histis, a kind of
fish which Klamath Indians like.

When Isis and Kumush got to the third camping place, Kumush
called it Bláielka and the mountain he called Ktáila­wetĕs. He said to
Isis: “You must swim in the swimming pond on this mountain, and
pile up stones, and talk to the mountain.”

Isis went to the pond and while he was in the water he saw nice
gambling sticks and felt them touch his body. When he was through
swimming and was coming out, Gäk flew by. He saw Isis standing in
the water, and he thought: “I wonder where that bright thing in the
water came from. It won’t come here again!” That minute Isis was
turned to stone, but his spirit escaped, and went to his father’s
camping place.

Isis and Kumush stayed a long time at Bláielka, then Kumush said: “I
must travel around and work; you can stay here.” Kumush left Isis on
Dúilast, a mountain on the eastern side of Tula Lake and he started
off for the west.

While Kumush was gone, many women came to live with Isis.
Among his wives were Tókwa, Wéakûs, Djakkonus, Tcíktcikûs,
Kládo, Tseks, Dohos, Dúdûte, Tcíkas, Kols, Nada and Wálwilegas.
The first wife to have a child was Tcíkas, who had a little boy. Tcíkas
was uneasy about Kumush; she was afraid something had
happened to him.

Isis said: “Nothing can hurt Kumush. He will be here soon. He can go
around the world in two days.”
The next morning Kumush came, bringing in his hands little bundles
of seeds of every kind. He threw those seeds in different directions,
and talked to the mountains, the hills, the rivers and springs, to all
places, telling them to take the seeds, to care for them and keep
them forever. And he told them not to harm his grandson.

Isis’ wives were so nice to look at that Kumush fell in love with them
and began to think how to get rid of Isis.

One day when he was hunting, Isis used his last arrow. Kumush
said: “I will make some arrows, but you must get eagle feathers to
put on them. When I was coming home I saw an eagle’s nest on the
top of a tree. There were eggs in it; the eggs [13]are hatched by this
time. You can get some of the young eagles.” And he told him where
the tree was.

When Isis came to the tree, he took off his buckskin clothes and
climbed up to the nest. He found the eagles and threw them to the
ground. As he threw the last one, he looked down, and he nearly lost
his mind, for at Kumush’s word the tree had grown so tall that it
almost touched the sky. Isis’ clothes were under the tree. He saw
Kumush come and put them on, then pick up the eagles, and start
for home.

Before leaving the house, Kumush had said to Isis’ wives: “I am

going for wood.” When he came back, the women thought he was
Isis. When he asked: “Where is Kumush?” they said: “He went for
wood and hasn’t come back.”

Kumush hurried the sun down and right away it was dark. All the
women except Wálwilegas, Kols, Tcíkas and Tókwa thought he was
Isis.

The next morning Tcíkas asked Wálwilegas what she thought.

“He isn’t Isis,” said Wálwilegas.

“That is what I think,” said Tcíkas.

Kols cried and tears ran down her cheeks. “Tears,” said she, “are a
sign that Isis is in trouble.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Kumush. “Hurry up and get me
something to eat. I don’t want people to come here to gamble; we
will go where they are.”

After Kumush had eaten enough, he and all the women, except
Wálwilegas, Kols and Tcíkas, started for Pitcowa, the place where
Isis always went to gamble. (A broad flat northeast of Tula Lake.)

As Kumush traveled, he set fire to the grass; the smoke went

crooked. People saw it, and said: “That is not Isis. Isis’ smoke
always goes straight up to the sky.”

Kumush knew their thoughts. He tried to make the smoke go

straight; part went straight and part went crooked.

Then they said: “Maybe that is Isis.”

When he got near, the people asked: “Where is Kumush?”

“He stayed at home; he didn’t want to come.” [14]

Some thought: “This man doesn’t look just like Isis,” but they began
to gamble with him.

When all the women had gone except Wálwilegas and Tcíkas and
Kols, Kols began to track her husband. Wálwilegas followed her.
Tcíkas put her baby on her back and started for Pitcowa. She felt
lonesome. She traveled slowly, digging roots as she went along.
Kols tracked Isis to the tree. Then she said: “He is up in this tree, but
he must be dead.”

“He is alive,” said Wálwilegas. “I hear him breathe. He loved his

other wives and didn’t care for us. They have gone off with another
man; now he will find out who loves him.”

Kols tried to dig the tree up, but couldn’t; then Wálwilegas began to
make a basket. When the basket was ready, Kols strapped it on her
back and flew up part way to try it. She came back, got something
for Isis to eat and bear’s fat to rub him with, then she started again.
She flew in circles around the tree, camped one night and reached
Isis the next night. He was almost dead. She gave him seeds and
rubbed him with bear’s fat. The next morning she put him in the
basket and started down; she got home at midday.

Kols and Wálwilegas fed Isis well. Every night they rubbed him with
bear’s fat and soon he was well again. Then they fixed a sweat-
house and he sweated till his skin was nice and soft. It became
rough while he was on the tree. After he had sweated, they put nice
clothes on him.

Isis asked: “How did Tókwa and Nada and the others act while I was
lost?”

“They didn’t care much,” said Kols; “they were not sorry.”

When the people at Pitcowa had gambled long enough, they began
to play ball. Some thought that the man they were playing with was
Isis; others thought he was Kumush.

Kumush had the disk on his back. It looked like a great scar. One
day, while the people were disputing, some saying that he was Isis,
others that he was Kumush, a man hired a doctor to make the south
wind blow. When Kumush ran north after [15]the ball and stooped
down to pick it up, the wind raised his blanket and everybody saw
the scar. Then they knew Kumush. They shouted, whooped and
laughed. They stopped the game and gathered around him.

After Isis had sweated, he said: “We will go and see what Kumush is
doing.” He went ahead of Kols and Wálwilegas, and as he traveled
he set fire to the grass. The smoke went straight up to the sky.
People saw the smoke, and said: “That is Isis! Isis is coming now!”
Kumush saw the smoke and was scared; he trembled and almost
lost his mind.

Tcíkas had been camping and digging roots. She was mourning for
Isis. The child saw Isis coming and called out “Tsutowas” (father).

“Don’t call your father,” said Tcíkas, “your father is dead.”

The boy called again, and again. Tcíkas shook him and scolded him.

“Why do you do that?” asked Isis.

Tcíkas turned and saw Isis. She was glad, for she thought he was
lost or dead. “Where were you?” asked she. “How did you get back?”

“Wálwilegas and Kols, the wives I didn’t care for, saved me.” Then
he told her how Wálwilegas found him in the eagle’s nest, and how
she and Kols carried him home and cured him.

When Isis got to the gambling place, Kumush wanted to talk to him,
wanted to be friendly. But Isis was angry; he wouldn’t let Kumush
come near him. He had Kols and Wálwilegas gather wood and build
a big fire; then he called to his wives who were with Kumush and told
them to come to him. They wouldn’t come, for they were afraid. Then
he willed that they should come, and they had to; his word drew
them, and they couldn’t help going.
He burned their feet and made them red; then he said: “You will no
longer be people; you will be birds and will scatter over the world.
People will kill you, for you will be good to eat.” They turned into
ducks and water birds and flew away. Then Isis threw Kumush into
the fire and covered [16]him with burning wood. He burned him to
ashes, but in the ashes was the disk.

The next morning the morning star, Kumush’s medicine, called out to
the disk: “Why do you sleep so long? Get up, old man!” That minute
Kumush was alive—he will last as long as the disk and the morning
star.

Isis knew now that Kumush would never die, that nothing could kill
him. Isis wandered off among the mountains, and as he traveled he
sang a beautiful song, that no one else could sing. People could
imitate it, but they couldn’t repeat it or understand it.

Kumush followed Isis everywhere for years. At last he overtook him.

He wanted to be kind, and live as before, but Isis said: “After what
you did to me you may go wherever you want to in the world, and I
will go where I want to. You are not my father. I feel that. I hope that
of the people, who are to come into the world hereafter, no father will
ever treat his son as you have treated me.”

Kumush went to Tula Lake to live. Then Isis turned one of his three
faithful wives to a butterfly, another to a badger and the third to a
wren, and then he went to live alone on Tcutgósi, a high mountain.
[17]

1 Different events in the lives of Isis and Kumush are represented by rocks on
that side of Tula Lake. Half-way up a high mountain is the house in which
Kumush and Isis lived (a large rock); near Deus (Stork’s bill), is Isis (a rock of
peculiar shape), and at the northwest corner of Tula Lake is Kumush himself. ↑
2 The rocky summit of a mountain near Lake Tula. ↑
3 A mountain in Oregon. ↑
[Contents]
 THE FIVE BROTHERS OF LÁTKAKÁWAS

CHARACTERS

Blaiwas Eagle Lĭsgaga

Dûnwa Stone Mortar Lóluk Fire
Gäk Crow Naulintc
Gáukos Moon Wekwek Magpie
Kaiutois Wolf Wûlkûtska Marten

When Látkakáwas went to Kumush’s sweat-house with the disk, her

five brothers started for the east, traveling a little toward the north.
After a long time they came to a village where there were many
people. All those people had their heads shaven and covered with
cedar pitch, for they were mourning.

In the house at the edge of the village lived three orphans, the
Naulintc children, two girls and a boy. They were so poor that they
had nothing to eat.

Látkakáwas’ brothers went in and sat down by the fire. They put their
elbows on their knees and their heads on their hands. They felt
lonesome, for they were mourning for their brother-in-law.

The little boy, Gáukos, began to cry, for he was scared. His elder
sister scolded him, and said: “Be quiet; these men didn’t come here
to hurt you. If you don’t stop crying, I will throw you out!”

Gáukos kept on crying, and at sunset his sister threw him out. She
threw him his blanket and laughed at him, and said: “You can go to