I sin bok Människans villkor, 1958, visar Hannah Arendt hur hämnd fångar förövare och utsatta i våldet. Hämnden låser fast dem i den våldsamma relationen.
Förlåtelse bryter sig istället ut ur fångenskapen. Förlåtelse befriar, enligt Arendt, deltagarna från våldets nödvändighet och öppnar upp andra möjligheter.
”In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic re-action to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.”1
Per Herngren
7 juli 2026, version 0.1
Fotnot
- Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Second edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, s 240-241, original 1958. Svensk översättning: Människans villkor, Göteborg: Daidalos, 2016. ↩︎