Forgiveness has traditionally been associated with a duty to remember in order for reconciliation to be possible; forgetting had to be excluded in the interest of a truthful and genuinely new beginning. The essays collected in this volume seek to challenge this traditional picture by finding new ways of relating forgiveness to forgetting ultimately leading to the precarious question of whether even God forgets when he forgives.
Forgiveness has traditionally been associated with a duty to remember in order for reconciliation to be possible. Human failure, evil, and atrocities could thus only be forgiven on the basis of a saving memory. Forgetting, by contrast, had to be excluded in the interest of a truthful and genuinely new beginning. Historical experience, it seemed, supported this account. The essays collected in this volume seek to challenge this traditional picture - by elaborating on the notion of forgetting, by reappreciating its constructive or even necessary impact on our lives, by paying heed to the potential obstacles for reconciliation due to an unforgiving remembrance, by clarifying the relationship between remembrance and forgetting, which is not necessarily complementary, and by finding new ways of relating forgiveness to forgetting ultimately leading to the precarious question of whether even God forgets when he forgives.
Table of contents:
Hartmut von Sass /
Johannes Zachhuber: Forgetting. An Introductory Reminder
Part I: Forgetfulness Contextualized
Aleida Assmann: How much Forgetting Does Memory Need? Exploring the Margins of Memorial Culture -
Bradford Vivian: On the Presence of Forgetting in Public Culture -
Brigitte Boothe: »Impossible that I did this, my pride says.« (Fr. Nietzsche). Psychoanalysis of Motivated Forgetting -
Agata Bielik-Robson: Psychotheology of Forgetting
Part II: God-forsakenness and Reconciliation
George Pattison: Death and Being: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Forgetfulness -
Simon D. Podmore: Forgetting and the God-forsaken: The Apophasis of Forgiveness -
Paul Fiddes: Memory, Forgetting and the Problem of Forgiveness: Reflecting on Volf, Derrida and Ricœur -
Lydia Schumacher: Forgetting and Forgiving: An Augustinian Perspective
Part III: Divine Forgetting. At the Margins of Soteriology
Hartmut von Sass: Does God Forget When He Forgives? An Essay in Soteriology -
Johannes Zachhuber: Forgiveness between Remembrance and Forgetting -
Philipp Stoellger: Forgetting the Unforgettable? Or: Memory's Mystery is Oblivion
