Indeterminacy, Judgment, and the Unforgivable: Rethinking the Ethics of Relation with Andrew Benjamin

This article considers the ethical stakes of Andrew Benjamin’s relational ontology. Turning to his concept of “anoriginal relationality,” I consider how relation, understood ontologically, necessitates both a promise and risk for communal life. It is only in being born of a non-determined, plural event that relation promises belonging. Yet, in making this promise, relation also produces a vulnerability to forms of communal life that suppress plurality in the name of belonging. Among Benjamin’s most important contributions is to show that a relational ethics need neither evade this tension nor surrender to a Derridian ethics of impossibility. By interpreting judgment in Virtue in Being as an interruption between the conditioned and unconditioned, he shows how this tension yields ethical possibility rather than impossibility. Whereas Benjamin focuses on judgment and forgiveness, I conclude by raising the question of what his analysis means for the unforgivable – or actions that defy judgment – and suggest, through Hannah Arendt, that an ethics of relation might require a further faculty: understanding.