Forgiveness in Sally Rooney

Hannah Arendt

Judith Butler

cARE ETHICS AND FORGIVENESS IN SALLY ROONEY'S BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU? (2021)

Sofía Alférez Mendía

start

philosophy...

Sally rOONEY IN CONTEXT

IN LINE WITH THE irish SOCIAL CONTEXT

the work

Love and relationships... and sex

Beautiful World (2023)

Erosion of Catholic hegemony

+ info

The "millennial Jane Austen" (Muro 2022)

New webs of meaning

+ info

HOW HANNAH ARENDT'S FORGIVENESS AND JUDITH BUTLER'S RELATIONALITY RESONATE IN BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU?

HANNAH ARENDT

JUDITH BUTLER

“we are treated, hailed, and formed by social norms that precede us and that form the constraining context for whatever forms of agency we ourselves take on in time” (Butler, 2016: 18)

a subject is a “subject in the twofold sense of the word”, that is, an “actor and sufferer” (1958: 185).

FORGIVENESS

natality

CONCLUSIONS

Politics

big generational gap, but similar concerns?

climate change

Totalitarianism

gender issues

All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg (1952)

Second World War

"her words seemed to express something completely true about my experience of living, and about life itself" (Rooney 2022, 4)

big influence

Late capitalism

How can human beings live together?

"In times of crisis she learns - and we learn along with her - that there can be no ethics without politics" (Rooney 2022, 4).

works cited

Muro, Alicia. "¿Es Sally Rooney la Jane Austen milenial?", elPeriódico, 3 jul. 2022, https://www.elperiodico.com/es/opinion/20220703/sally-rooney-jane-austen-milenial-13989627, [Accessed 21 nov. 2024] Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958. Butler, Judith. “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance.” Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2016, pp. 12-27. Inglis, Tom. Meanings of Life in Contemporary Ireland: Webs of Significance. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Rooney, Sally. "Sally Rooney talks to Kishany Widyaratna about ‘Normal People’". YouTube, uploaded by London Review Bookshop, 8 May 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jH_0rg46Es. Rooney, Sally. "Introduction", All Our Yesterdays. London, Faber&Faber, 2022. Rooney, Sally. Conversations with Friends. London, Faber&Faber, 2017. Rooney, Sally. Normal People. London, Faber&Faber, 2018. Rooney, Sally. Beautiful World, Where Are You. London, Faber&Faber, 2021. Rooney, Sally. Intermezzo. London, Faber&Faber, 2024.

Felix's confession:

“She said she wanted to, but she was afraid of getting pregnant. And I told her it wouldn’t happe n” (Rooney 2021, 123).

Alice's confession:

Alice on forgiveness:

“I bullied a girl I was in school with, really cruelly. For no reason, other than I suppose to torture her. Because other people were doing it. But then they would say they were doing it because I was. When I remember it now, I mostly just feel scared.” (Rooney 2021, 124).

“But maybe it’s not easy at all – maybe to weep and prostrate ourselves with genuine sincerity is the hardest thing we could ever learn how to do. I feel certain I don’t understand how to do it. I have that resistance in me, that hard little kernel of something” (Rooney 2021, 137)

Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021)

The "protestantisation" of Catholicism -through Simon's practices -Alice on religion:

The "secularisation" of love - relationships and care is the source of hope and faith

“in the morning I wake up feeling almost painfully happy. To live with someone I really love and respect, who really loves and respects me – what a difference it has made to my life. Of course everything is terrible at the moment, and I miss you ardently, […] but all that really means is that I love my life, and I’m excited to have it back again, excited to feel that it’s going to continue, that new things will keep happening, that nothing is over yet” (Rooney 2021, 336).

"He [Jesus] seems to me to embody a kind of moral beauty, and my admiration for that beauty even makes me want to say that I 'love' him, though I'm well aware how ridiculous that sounds" (Rooney 2021, 185)

New Webs of Meaning

The secularisation of love:

“in the absence of a religious rhetoric, of religious symbols, gestures, and practices, in telling stories about death, illness, tragedy, and loss, that love has become secular and replaced religion as the core meaning of life.” (Inglis 2014, 156)

The protestantisation of Catholicism

People “devis[e] their own path to salvation: while believing in core Christian beliefs, they do not belong to the church or participate in its rituals and practices in the same way as in previous generations.” (Inglis 2014, 125)

Natality in Beautiful World:

Eileen explains that “having a child is simply the most ordinary thing I can imagine doing. And I want that – to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care” (p 337).

Hope and faith in human kind

Arendt's forgiveness as a remedy for...

- unpredictability- irreversibility

consequences of living in a plural world

“trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on” (Arendt 1958, 239-240)

Arendt on natality

as that which ...

“saves the world […] from its normal, “natural” ruin" (1958: 247)

the birth of new human beings means “the new beginning”, and it is, indeed, what “bestow upon human affairs faith and hope” (idem).