Bernadette Meyler’s Theaters of Pardoning offers a profound and provocative meditation on the relationship between forgiveness and the state. In this comment, I follow her methodological and substantive lead by taking literary and legal approaches to a curious form of pardoning she discusses in her work—the “Act of Oblivion.” The Act of Oblivion operated as a super-pardon: It was “a form of general amnesty erasing the record of the underlying events rather than simply remitting punishment.” Pardon is to oblivion as forgiving is to forgetting.
Copy and paste this URL into your WordPress site to embed
Copy and paste this code into your site to embed