ABSTRACT
Having discussed the question of justice itself in the previous chapter, in this chapter, I will focus on some other crucial aspects that are normally attributed to the sovereign function, namely the question of forgiveness and judgment. The basic question I will pose here is whether it is possible to fi nd a form of human forgiveness and/or the ability to make judgments in the face of the Benjamin concept of divine violence. At fi rst glance, Benjamin’s notion of divine violence may seem to suggest that judgment and forgiveness are exclusively the province of a God that is utterly unknowable. For Benjamin, when human beings make judgments, they inherently risk idolatry and myth, a hubristic replacement of the true (divine) font of justice with some imagined (and false) alternative. In the face of the awesome and irrefutable power of the divine, what do we make of the ability of human beings to make their own judgments? How are human beings able to forgive, when they cannot know the bases for justice that underpin such decisions? Insofar as sovereignty is invested, among other powers, with ‘standing in for God’ in terms of making these kinds of judgments, is there any alternative to the kinds of pseudo divine powers that we ordinarily invest in our political leaders?
