Philosophy Today

published on May 25, 2021

Kristeva vis-à-vis Hegel
Forgiveness as Psychoanalytic Interpretation and Absolute Knowing

This article reconstructs and compares Kristeva’s account of psychoanalytic interpretation as a practice of forgiveness with Hegel’s account of the origin of Absolute Knowing in the forgiveness constitutive of mutual recognition. An emphasis on homologies between the memory-work of Kristevan psychoanalysis and the recollective process of Hegelian Absolute Knowing elicits deeper affinities between Kristeva and Hegel than have previously been supposed. Both Kristevan and Hegelian forgiveness operate as the healing of an originary guilt, achieved through the verbal confession and examination of the confessor’s particular biographical and historical past, negating and raising up—sublating or sublimating—the contradictions of consciousness. Psychoanalysis and Absolute Knowing both enact in the present the reconciliation which religion perpetually defers to an unspecified future. While not replacing the institution of legal punishment, Kristevan and Hegelian forgiveness qua personal and social renewal and rebirth provide for the possibility of radical political transformation.