A significant strain of contemporary Continental political philosophy takes as its point of departure the horrific fact of the Shoah under Nazi Germany and considers the conceptual origins of such political cruelty in the structuring exclusions that characterise the operation of Western sovereignty (Agamben 2005; 1999; Derrida 2009; see Bignall 2014b). Other thinkers take European fascism as an implicit horizon informing their efforts to understand how docile bodies become compliant with the powers that repress them, or to theorise creative desire as the condition of a ‘non-fascist’ life (see the preface in AO). Ongoing investigation and repudiation of the ideas underscoring the exclusion and attempted annihilation of Europe’s internal others is undeniably important and prescient, especially when support for neo-fascism is swelling in many European centres. However, although Hannah Arendt (1968) points to the conceptual framework of imperialism as a source of the fascist totalitarianism that underscored the events of the Shoah and made them possible, Continental philosophers have generally been less inclined to think about the horrors Europe inflicted on its external others as a result of colonisation. This neglect on the part of Continental philosophy is still more troubling because the dark legacy of Western colonisation extends materially into the time of the now.

The present chapter is situated in the context of a legacy of colonial fascism in Australia, which included a formal policy of child removal that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in 1997 identified as a settler-colonial programme of genocide. It considers the formal apology given in 2008 by the Australian government to Indigenous ‘Stolen Generations’, alongside the state’s simultaneous disinclination to explicitly ask for the forgiveness of Indigenous Australians. Employing a perspectival, associative and decolonising methodology that seeks points of intercultural alliance across diverse traditions of thought, I position Indigenous conceptualisations of ontological plenitude alongside Nietzsche’s thinking about the exercise of the ‘gift-giving virtue’ as a mode of sovereign existence. The aim of the discussion is to investigate the sovereign implications of the politics of giving and receiving implicit within the acts of apology and forgiveness. I argue that forgiveness (like apology) is a definitive sovereign act, and therefore that the Australian government’s refusal to supplicate for Indigenous pardon is also a refusal to acknowledge Indigenous authority inherent in the sovereign capacity for forgiveness.