Forgiveness, revenge and the remaking of moral community

This article explores the connections between Arendt’s understanding of regret and forgiveness, and Améry’s conception of resentment and vengeance. Despite their deep disagreement over how we should respond to the Holocaust, they share: a conception of grave wrongs as consisting in the destruction of a moral community between victim and perpetrator; and an understanding of forgiveness and revenge (generally understood as opposite, mutually exclusive responses to resentment) as both being attempts to recover such community. This gives Améryan revenge a morally defensible purpose which runs contrary to the wholesale condemnations of vengeance common in mainstream Western ethics.