A Poetics of Forgiveness: Cultural Responses to Loss and Wrongdoing by Jill Scott (review)

A Poetics of Forgiveness: Cultural Responses to Loss and Wrongdoing is Jill Scott's second book and is just as impressive and elegant in its writing as her first, Electra after Freud: Myth and Culture (Cornell UP, 2005). Grounded in an analysis of German writing and reactions to the atrocities of the Third Reich (including discussions of Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Hannah Arendt), A Poetics of Forgiveness argues for the significance of German Studies outside the field. In addition to the above authors, she investigates responses to the Second World War in H.D.'s 1941 memoir, The Gift, and in the post-war photography of Robert J. Fleming, an American. In the second part of her book, Scott addresses crises of clemency and mercy within other national frameworks, including the aftermath to apartheid in South Africa, the Rwandan genocide, and the bombing of the World Trade Center. A Poetics of Forgiveness offers a rich comparison of various theories of forgiveness and reconciliation, including those by Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler, and Kelly Oliver. It eloquently pleads for the importance of literature and the visual arts as giving voice to conflictive feeling and aiding in the difficult work of extending pardon. For Scott, forgiveness is a poetic act that calls on individual human beings to labour imaginatively and creatively towards communicative resolution and understanding. Literature, through its deployment of metaphor and ambiguity, facilitates the transformative achievement of forgiveness.

In the last twenty years, at the very least, German Studies has seen considerable scholarship devoted to trauma, guilt, shame, mourning, and memorialization in the wake of the Holocaust. But I cannot think of one work that examines the intricacies of forgiveness! As Scott points out, "[T]rauma studies take precedent over peace studies, and books on war vastly outnumber those on reconciliation" (201). Building on psychoanalytically informed studies on trauma and mourning, she takes the debate on these issues one step forward. Forgiveness supports and extends the ongoing work of mourning; it means relinquishing resentment that the melancholic individual holds against the lost object. And it breaks the narcissistic cycle of self-absorption that characterizes trauma and melancholia. The author cites Oliver's insight that "[f]orgiveness makes it possible to become a subject without murdering the other or dejecting or abjecting oneself" (124).

From Derrida's concept of the unconditional, excessive gift of forgiveness to Oliver's notion that "it is forgiveness, not alienation, that enables subjectivity" (12), with each chapter Scott introduces a new dimension to the complexities and difficulties of forgiveness. She is aware of the dangers of simplistic public apology that can be deployed as vote-buying tactics. As well, she examines, by focusing on the individual's responsibility to extend pardon, the dangers of the exculpation of the individual when crimes of history are addressed impersonally through public reconciliation, amnesty, or memorialization, however important these actions are. The power of the novels Scott analyses is that they do justice to the intricacies of individual lives in a way that monuments and the public media cannot; literature leads us to think about forgiveness outside of institutional structures. At the same time, she stresses that "[n]o single subject can grant forgiveness; rather the subject is shaped by this meaningful forgiveness" (124). In other words, forgiveness moves us away from isolation, alienation, poisoned memory, self-interest, and resentment. It takes us away from what at times can be the secure position of the victim. We do not speak it as much as it speaks us; hence it brings us into community with one another. She illustrates these notions by examining a beautiful photograph of children in post-war Germany by Robert Fleming: their presence in the photo mediates forgiveness that needs to be extended towards German transgression. Thus, in response to Susan Sontag's cautionary warning that war photography can desensitize...