The concluding chapter of French philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch’s book Foregivenss is titled “The Unforgivable.” In its pages, the author succinctly and passionately summarizes the idea of forgiveness developed throughout the book. After Auschwitz and in the face of the extreme Nazi evil, Jankélévitch formulates a radical idea of forgiveness which is not based on justifying the crime or forgetting it. True forgiveness, the only forgiveness worthy of being called that, is forgiveness for the unforgivable, for the crime that can neither be justified nor understood. It is given spontaneously from victim to torturer as a total act of love, erasing the past in one fell swoop and separating the crime from its agent. Forgiveness then appears as a sublime but unbearably difficult moral test, since it places the victim between absolute love and absolute evil, between the duty to love and the duty to destroy evil, without being able to find resolution between the two.
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