Impossible Forgiveness: Levinas and Rwanda in Dialogue

This work focuses on conflict and recovery, using the forgiveness projects following the 1994 Rwandan Genocide as a case study and the philosophy of Levinas as a discussion partner in learning how we can and should respond to such violence constructively. I seek to construct a phenomenological theory of forgiveness attentive to the lived experience of embodied individuals who survived the genocide. In researching reconciliation and forgiveness as these phenomena emerge from, define, and are defined by human experience, I make use of data from a wide variety of sources, including commission reports, archival video footage, student theses and public memorial records, as well as substantial material in the arts including sermons, songs, poetry, painting, and sculpture.;In the tradition of philosophical phenomenology, this work is deeply influenced by the Levinasian argument that face-to-face direct contact between self and the Other (the person to whom one bears responsibility as a pure result of contact and the associated primordial request for respect) is a critical moment both in forgiveness and in reestablishing ethical responsibility. Such encounters -- facilitated in varied settings across Rwanda -- reestablish ethical recognition at the same moment that they cling fiercely to memory and memorialization. Notably, this strategy of forgiveness contradicts the dominant Christian popular rhetoric of forgetting and simultaneously bears markers of a distinctively Jewish insistence on memory. In Rwanda, and at large, no new vision of the future can exist without the past; forgiveness only becomes possible through heightened memory.