The Epilogue of Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting is entitled ‘Difficult Forgiveness’, indicating that forgiveness is neither easy nor impossible. As the common horizon of memory, history and forgetting, it is always attracting but never reached. Ultimately its two dimensions diverge: below the awareness of guilt, above the gift of forgiveness. There is no conceptual middle ground between them. Neither can we construe a form of reciprocity between the demand of being forgiven and the offer to forgive, nor build on the symmetry between an agent binding herself to an action (as in promising) and releasing her from this bond (as in forgiving). Forgiveness points to a realm beyond established social relationships, a realm where an agent is regarded a priori as a moral subject, i.e., as someone capable of rejecting what she did wrong in the name of the good. Both a negative and a positive consequence follow from that. The negative one reads that there is no public dimension in forgiveness, that ‘the people’ cannot be the agent of forgiving, and that there cannot be political institutions of genuine reconciliation. While individuals can, polities cannot pose as agents summoned by a moral norm. In other words, they are unable to relate the wrongness of their actions to their selfh ood. In the final analysis they can neither bear nor lift moral guilt. What they can do is to engage in ‘a culture of considerateness’, moderation, or clemency, in order to normalise their relationships. Certain public gestures can further this disposition to considerateness on a public scale, but this does not amount to public forgiveness. The positive thesis is that forgiveness can only be thought in a time beyond time, in the optative mode of wish and hope rather than in the indicative mode of description or the imperative mode of prescription. For this anticipation of a memory that will once turn out be unequivocally ‘blessed’, Ricoeur uses the theological term ‘eschatology’, though in a radically philosophical (rather than a theological) sense.

In an equally philosophical vein I propose to ask what is the protology correlate with this eschatology? What is the ‘beginning’ of times, or the ‘time before time’, that is both preparing for and recaptured by ‘the end of times’, or the ‘time beyond time’?