The silence of evil and the gramar of forgiveness

In a world marked by wounds that refuse to heal — political, psychological, and spiritual — The Silence of Evil and the Grammar of Forgiveness asks a question as old as Job and as urgent as today: How can one forgive without denying memory?
Drawing on the hermeneutical philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, the ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas, and the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion, René Dentz offers a profound meditation on the intersections between theology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Forgiveness emerges here not as moral consolation, but as a hermeneutical event — an act of freedom that reconfigures memory, transfigures trauma, and reopens time to the possibility of hope.
Dentz argues that evil, in its silence, is not only the absence of good but the interruption of meaning. Against this silence, forgiveness becomes a work of interpretation — a grammar through which the human being learns again to speak, to remember, and to love. The book traverses biblical and philosophical traditions, from Augustine to Ricoeur and from Buber to Marion, to reveal forgiveness as both the deepest ethical gesture and the most vulnerable form of transcendence.
At once contemplative and critical, this work belongs to that rare space where thought becomes listening. It invites readers into the fragile territory where theology faces the unconscious, and where philosophy learns again to hope.

“True forgiveness is inseparable from responsible remembrance. It is the silent ‘yes’ that allows life, even wounded, to begin again.”