Christopher Peys proposes to “resuscitate” the practices of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism and show how they can be forms of political action that advance justice, inclusion, the overcoming of polarization, and the reconstruction of political orders in which civic friendship is wounded (xx). These practices, which he roots in the thought of Hannah Arendt above all, can elicit a “dilation” of politics (145), he argues, in a time of intractable division, violence, and exclusion.
Peys's endeavor is a constructive one, a labor of hope. His arguments for the practices are secular ones—he asserts forgiveness as a “distinctly non-‘messianic’ and non-transcendental form of action”—yet he describes them as “miraculous” and as capable of bringing about new beginnings and transformations that would not be possible by the logic of ordinary political processes and concepts (38, italics included). The times call for such practices. Peys writes of polarization in the United States, for which there is ample evidence, both in political language and in rigorous academic studies, and of forms of exclusion towards minorities and foreigners. He might have discussed also the rise of nationalism in India, Hungary, and Russia as well as the tens of societies that have sought to overcome the divisions of civil war and dictatorship in the past half century. It is in these settings that forgiveness has emerged in political practice and scholarly thought and that cosmopolitanism, inclusion across borders and boundaries, has come to be proposed—the two practices whose rationale Peys wishes to develop and whose possibilities he wishes to plumb.
Peys begins his argument by engaging the thought of Jacques Derrida, the theorist who examined the two concepts together in his book of 2001, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Derrida held that forgiveness, inescapably of Roman Catholic origins, was now on the rise. Indeed he could point to a wave of academic literature, grants, truth commissions, and programs to promote forgiveness in business and other civil-society institutions (8). Forgiveness, though, Derrida argued, is subject to aporias, or inner contradictions. First, forgiveness is only pure or true when it is unconditional, pure gift, yet will always be subject to conditions in actual practice (11–12). Second, forgiveness, an alternative to punishment which is normal, is only possible for crimes of such magnitude that they are impossible to forgive (12–13). Third, forgiveness involves an exercise of power as the forgiver makes a judgment over others, yet this power erodes forgiveness as a pure gift (14–15). A deconstructionist, Derrida believes that these contradictions are impossible to overcome. Yet he does not reject forgiveness but rather calls for people to “negotiate” the space between the contradictions (16).
Derrida's other concept, cosmopolitanism, amounts to a radical openness to the “other,” as Peys describes it. Again, Derrida wrote in response to circumstances, in this case rising calls for limiting immigration in France; he puts forth a concept of universal welcome (19–22). He warns that this openness is prone to power imbalances that render the welcoming society economically and culturally neocolonialist (28). Still, he calls for an ethic that amounts to a secularized form of Judeo-Christian universal, unconditional hospitality (16–28).
Peys accepts and promotes both of Derrida's practices yet wants to develop both in a respect that he believes Derrida misses. He wants to adapt them to the realm of the political so that they involve “care for the world” and bring together a plurality of people, build a web of relationships, and exercise the power of giving freedom of public action to people who have been eclipsed. This expansion to the political, he believes, can overcome the aporias of forgiveness by reshaping the exercise of power and freedom that is involved, as well as the individual, private nature of cosmopolitan's welcome of the other. “I re-world Derrida's theory of cosmopolitan hospitality through Arendt's work,” writes Peys (29). The conceptualization of and vocabulary for this re-worlding, Peys finds in the work of Arendt.
Peys described Arendt's forgiveness as a practice that promotes the public good. It contains the power to resolve the problem of irreversibility, to break cycles of violence in which revenge counters revenge (38). Forgiveness creates new beginnings, exerting the miraculous force of natality by which life emerges as a gift (39). Forgiveness embodies several of Arendt's key political concepts. It is a form of care by which the forgiver performs a free, nonviolent action on the political stage that exerts the kind of power that creates and enables. While vengeance is predictable, forgiveness interrupts the normal course of political behavior (42–43). Forgiveness is directed not at isolated individuals but rather at a plurality of equal citizens who share civic friendship (55–67). Writes Peys, “[forgiveness] is a public practice capable of caring for the potentiality contained within the ‘world’: the ability to act freely and to begin new courses of ‘action’ with a plurality of other people. A ‘caring forgiveness,’ cares for the capacity to begin new courses of action in the public realm: the ‘common home’ shared with a plurality of people” (65). Forgiveness, though, has limits, in Arendt's argument. Writing after the Holocaust, she holds that it is impossible to forgive what cannot be punished—evil that exceeds all bounds of proportionate human action (44–45).
Cosmopolitanism is likewise a matter of “world caring,” a form of public action that possesses the power to transform politics so as to accord equality to people who are otherwise smothered (79). Central to this empowerment in Peys's Arendtian account is “storytelling,” a “thing” through which people “reveal themselves” and that merits public recognition (78, 92–93). Cosmopolitanism is not merely caring for the widow and the orphan but also recognizing their rightful free participation as equals in the sphere of politics.
The world-caring, empowering practices of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism are practiced freely in the “nunc stans,” or the standing now, whose possibilities are constrained but not controlled by the past and in which a person may create a future. Peys explores the role of time in performing these practices in the penultimate chapter of this tightly argued book (107–41).
Over the course of a discussion that risks abstruseness, Peys laces the story of Megan Phelps-Roper, an American woman who is well-known for having left Westboro Baptist Church, a Kansas congregation founded by her grandfather and infamous for its harsh and Manichean attacks on homosexuals. The public sphere, the world for which Phelps-Roper cared, was Twitter, where she communicated her repentance and transformation to a community made up of a plurality of equals who in turn affirmed and recognized her message. In Phelps-Roper's story, Peys locates the practices of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism and all of their theoretical components.
Peys succeeds in theorizing, elevating, and raising the profile in political theory of practices that promise renewal and an escape from traps of repeated, calcified violence and exclusion. The biggest question arising from his argument is that of justice. While he commends forgiveness and cosmopolitanism as practices that promote justice, he gives little consideration to aspects of justice that might counter or mitigate these practices. In a large literature in political and moral philosophy, forgiveness usually contends with the case for retribution and resentment as justified responses to past evil that are distinguishable from revenge and that do not inevitably fuel unstoppable cycles of retaliation. Forgiveness might survive this challenge and might even be compatible with retribution and resentment. Peys does not make this case, though. Nor does he address arguments that purport to counter or to mitigate radical cosmopolitanism. Does welcoming the immigrant imply open borders? Does Westboro's mistreatment of homosexuals imply the legitimacy of legalized same-sex marriage? The acceptance that Peys desires for his two practices requires a treatment of considerations of justice that goes beyond Arendtian care for the world. This treatment we may regard as unfinished business in a case for practices that Peys rightly argues are apposite and urgent in a debilitatingly divided time.
