Rick: Welcome to another episode of Hotel Bar Sessions. I’m Rick Lee, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Leigh Johnson and Devonya Havis and today we are talking about REVENGE.

Devonya: Dun dun dun dun!

Rick: But before we do that, as usual, let’s get some drinks. And I want to find out if you all are ranting or raving. Devonya, let me start with you.

Devonya: Well, I think I’m gonna have my old standby of a little seltzer and Rosie’s lime juice. And today I am ranting about exercise.

The joys and the dooms of moving one’s body.

Rick: Okay, we won’t go into more detail about that.

Leigh: Enough said.

Devonya: Well, for those of us who are getting creaky, pain is a great motivator.

Rick: Ah, yeah. Leigh, what about you? What are you drinking, and are you ranting or raving?

Leigh: I think I’m just going to have two fingers of Buffalo Trace with a rock today. And I’m going to be raving about The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

So this was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, and I still have a copy of it. And as a matter of fact, when I was a kid, I had the entire thing committed to memory. I could recite it from cover to cover without even looking. I was that much in love with this book.

I recently just kind of accidentally stumbled upon it again and sat down and read it. And it’s really just so, so good. In particular, there’s that line at the end where he says, “Unless people like you care a whole awful lot, nothing’s ever going to get better. It’s just not.” It’s a good reminder. So, The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

Rick, what about you? What are you drinking, and what are you ranting and raving about?

Rick: Well, as we are sitting here talking, I happen to be in Melbourne, Australia, and so in honor of that, I will have a St. Kilda’s lager. And I am raving today about the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy.

It’s the Australian SPEP, except it’s smaller and nicer. I also met some listeners, and I promised I would shout out to Will and Justin. Hey, Will and Justin, thanks for listening, and thanks for your support.

So, Devonya, I know we’re talking about revenge, but what did you have in mind?

Devonya: Well, on the one hand, people downplay revenge as a thing that we shouldn’t desire, something that is not praiseworthy, and yet there’s something deeply compelling.

There’s something attractive about revenge. Even if we’re suspending our ethical focus, there’s nonetheless something compelling about revenge, even if it’s simply a revenge fantasy. Even if I don’t envision myself actually enacting whatever behavior will constitute revenge, there’s something deeply satisfying about it.

From the kinds of things we watch in the movies to the kinds of books we read, just hearing urban tales about people who have enacted revenge in small ways—like buying secondhand keys, attaching a “call if found” note, and putting the phone number of someone they just don’t like on the notes.

More often than not, we’re encouraged to cultivate forgiveness, to turn the other cheek, because taking revenge is seen as something that will have an adverse effect—either in terms of its outcome, will have some kind of punishment, it will go wrong, or maybe it will do something undesirable to our moral character.

And so we’re discouraged from taking revenge and encouraged in the direction toward forgiveness. But I was wondering, might there be something such as ethical revenge? Is the telos of revenge to restore justice or simply to enact retribution? And might retribution for harms caused actually be a form of justice rather than a condition that leaves us in a state of just us?

——————

Devonya: When we were talking about topics, and there was this excitement about the topic of revenge, I was like, wait a minute, what exactly is revenge? So I went to the Oxford English Dictionary, which is the crusty old academic standby, to look up these definitions of revenge. Apparently, Oxford charts occurrences of certain words per million words in written English, and it was really fascinating that the term revenge has these peaks. So its greatest peak is around 1790, and then it falls off in the 1900s. And interestingly enough, it begins to start to peak again in 2010.

That is fascinating that we’ve got this uptick in the use of the term revenge. What exactly do we mean when we talk about revenge? Is revenge different than avenging something?

I’m a fan of martial arts movies and a fan of martial arts, and one of the recurring scenarios is always someone who has been tasked with undoing an injustice or harm that’s caused. Like, most of the Hong Kong 1970s martial arts movies are about this process of building oneself up to be able to have the skills necessary to avenge a wrong.

So why then do we think about revenge as something that is negative? The OED gave a number of definitions, some more archaic, some more contemporary, and the contemporary spiel was: the action of hurting, harming, or otherwise obtaining satisfaction from someone in return for an injury or wrong suffered at his or her hands; a satisfaction obtained by repaying an injury or a wrong.

And so I kept thinking, what makes revenge different than spite?

Rick: I think you’re warming the cockles of Leigh’s heart right now, because she loves these definitional questions.

Leigh: I do. I really do.

Rick: And you’re also warming the cockles of my heart because I always like thinking about a concept in terms of thinking as opposed to what. I think you raised two really good examples. What’s the difference between revenge and avenge? And what’s the difference between revenge and spite?

For me, the difference between revenge and spite is that spite is something I can have towards someone, even if I haven’t actually been harmed by them. Revenge is something that is always related to having been harmed.

Leigh: Yeah, I think I agree with that. I also think that spite is more of a disposition, and at least in my understanding, revenge involves some kind of an action. I mean, maybe it’s not actually doing some harm to someone, but it’s not just an attitude.

Devonya: And that raises another question for me: from what attitude does the action arise? One of the things that we said about spite is it arises from hostile or malignant feeling. So, if we think about that in distinction with revenge, revenge tends to come from a position of experiencing harm or wrong, as opposed to, “I just have a particular disposition toward this person that is hostile or malignant.”

Leigh: Yeah, and it’s really interesting to think about the difference between being wronged, feeling pain, feeling suffering because of that wrong, and being wronged and feeling revengeful—so that I want to actually do harm to someone else.

I mean, you know, there’s that old saying, “hurt people hurt people.” But what’s the difference between being a hurt person who’s hurt and being a hurt person who wants to hurt?

Devonya: And it raises for me the question of something that, at least in my upbringing, we were warned against—namely, to engage in a harm or a wrong because one has experienced a harm or a wrong. If we think about guidance that Plato’s Socrates would give us, we do not want to return a wrong with a wrong, even if the wrong was injurious, unjust, or hurtful.

Rick: But it seems to me that revenge in an interesting way is always tied to some notion of justice. If, for example, I was hurt in some way, but for me, it wasn’t an issue of justice, I wouldn’t say that I want to seek revenge. I would say I’m angry, I’m upset, I hate you, and so on.

But when I say I’m going to take revenge, I’m trying to balance something somehow—that the cosmic scales of justice seem to be out of whack, and I’m going to try to right that.

I’m focusing here on the re- part of revenge, right? It’s a kind of vengeance back toward. And so there’s a mutuality or, even better still, a reciprocity between the act that hurt me and my act of revenge toward the one who hurt me.

Leigh: I think that’s a really good point. I wonder, though, if it’s always the case that the person seeking revenge is seeking to balance the scales. Often, I think, when you hear people say, “I’m going to get my revenge,” they’re not really concerned about the proportionality of their actions.

You know, it’s like, I’m going to burn this to the ground in revenge. It’s not like, I’m going to get my revenge and then we’ll shake hands and be good neighbors afterwards.

Rick: Oh, yeah.

Devonya: Right. Or that there is no proportionality. So, if you think about much more large-scale forms of injustice, or people who have suffered under centuries of injustice, how can we think about revenge as being proportionate—or as some form of redistribution or distribution of more just circumstances or consequences?

To your point about not balancing the scales, but payback: Sometimes you just say, this experience of wrong is so egregious, there needs to be some kind of payback for that. Some kind of karmic retribution.

Leigh: Except it’s not going to be karmic. It’s going to come at my hands!

Devonya: Well, but I think that’s part of the fantasy of revenge, right? The belief that there can be karmic retribution that I’m not necessarily carrying out, but that it will somehow balance these injustices, even if I don’t experience it right now.

Rick: But then I would use the word avenge rather than revenge.

I think a harm that has been caused to me could be avenged by Leigh, for example. And I can think of a couple of examples where Leigh has actually avenged a wrong done to me. But if it’s revenge, then it’s something I’m doing. I’m the one seeking retribution or paying back, as you put it.

I like that, Devonya, because, you know, also paying back doesn’t necessarily have to be an equal paying back. I could pay back “in spades,” as we say. Not sure what that means, but I think it means “more than I was given.”

Devonya: Right. Retribution would come up when we’re thinking about revenge, so t’s not simply that I am avenging, but also, when we think about avenging, can it be an avenging that is retaliatory? How does retaliation differ from revenge? Because that has the quality of a certain kind of violent reciprocity, let’s say, but it is a relational way in which one is engaged.

Leigh: I think I might want to suggest that revenge is something that happens when relation has been completely broken…so I don’t think that it’s about proportionality, and I don’t even really think it’s about balancing anything.

Often, when you read revenge stories, the person who was the original wrongdoer has largely forgotten about it., right? While the other person sits in wait and plots their revenge for years and years and years. And then, when they enact it, maybe the other person doesn’t even know why this is happening or that this even is an act of revenge!

And so, in some ways, I think that there’s something very solipsistic about revenge. It’s about making me feel better. And the other person—they kind of become beside the point after a while, except as just a caricature that motivates the revenge fantasy.

So I’m wondering if this is actually the difference between revenge and other forms of payback or retribution or, you know, vengeance that we might confuse with justice: Revenge can’t be confused with justice because it isn’t relational in a way.

Devonya: Ah, I like where you’re going with this. And I am compelled by this idea of the solipsistic nature of revenge. I keep thinking about the United Health CEO who was assassinated and the ways in which people were engaging with the announcement of this—especially people who feel that they were wronged by corporate health.

The plotting may have been individual—something that the actor who actually engaged in the activity of assassinating the CEO thought about, planned, had their own personal vendetta or own personal set of issues… but the symbolic nature of this action was taken up by many on social media as a form of payback for the ways in which people were denied life-changing health care.

Rick: And your using that example makes me want to return to Leigh’s notion of solipsism because I think that it doesn’t go far enough. There is a relation to revenge, but it’s been internalized, and I’m playing this out inside myself because there always is another involved.

When I think about the feelings that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have about health insurance companies in the United States, many people feel avenged, but we don’t take this as a form of revenge. We think—or some people think—that this is a form of karmic justice. In other words, what goes around comes around. The scales have been rebalanced or reset because of this.

From the individual perspective, he might have been seeking revenge… but for me, it is entirely relational. There’s not the solipsistic element to it.

Leigh: Right. I completely agree with that. But again, to the person who is seeking or enacting their revenge, I don’t think it’s a matter of, I want you to get yours, like to get your “comeuppance.” What I want is for me to get mine.

That’s what I want. That’s where I think it again is a solipsistic world in which revenge exists.

Devonya: Interesting, because I’m thinking about the distinction between The Count of Monte Cristo, which I heard echoes of when you said the people against whom one is seeking revenge may have even forgotten about the wrong committed, and then all of a sudden they’re having their world fall out from beneath their feet, which has been masterminded by this person who has been waiting for decades.

Leigh: Yeah, it’s like Kill Bill. You guys know this film, the Tarantino film?

Devonya: Oh, yes.

Rick: I haven’t seen it.

Leigh: I mean, it’s a trilogy. A great revenge fantasy. But it’s exactly what you’re saying, Devonya: this person has just been lying in wait for years and years and years.

Devonya: And what’s interesting about Kill Bill is Bill knows. In the sequence of the movie, it’s actually someone who is associated with Bill—against whom the protagonist is seeking revenge—who says, that woman deserves her revenge.

I mean, there are numerous characters along the course of the film’s trajectory that understand she deserves her revenge. And that seems a little less solipsistic than The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, where it’s forgotten.

And I found it interesting as I was thinking about this, too, that we’re talking about a female protagonist in Kill Bill who is enacting revenge against people who have tried to kill her, and ultimately against someone who has taken her child away from her—who she hadn’t met because she was pregnant at the time that they tried to kill her. There’s a way in which that operates in ways that people understand that they’d wronged her and that she deserves some kind of revenge. She deserves some kind of payback for the wrong inflicted upon her.

So, I wonder if something like Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan would be the same, where Khan has this animus toward Captain Kirk, and even while facing death, he’s like, “from the depths of hell, I spit at you, Kirk!”

Rick: Right.

Devonya: There is this deep sense in which he wants to get even, and yet, the cost of that—he’s willing to pay anything for the cost of that. And no one else watching that, unlike Kill Bill or the case with the CEO, is saying, “Oh, I see this as a collective symbol of payback that is deserved.”

I think parsing those distinctions that Leigh was drawing out earlier around the solipsism versus this larger symbolic gesture is important.

Rick: It seems to me that somewhere along the way, we’ve been switching perspectives without noticing it.

One perspective is the perspective of the one seeking revenge—the one who felt the wrong, who sits and waits for the right time. I mean, as the saying goes, “revenge is a dish best served cold.”

From that perspective, I think Leigh’s right: they’re just seeking satisfaction. Not just anything would bring about satisfaction, or at least the person doesn’t think just anything would bring about the satisfaction. We might want to think about that.

But then, from the outside perspective, when we are looking at a revenge scenario, I think we’re in a slightly different position. We’re weighing the injustice that has originally been done against the plots and plans and, perhaps in the end, the action that is revenging the original injustice.

Leigh’s right that from the internal perspective, it’s always solipsistic. And I think it can only be related to a notion of justice from an external perspective.

Leigh: Right. And from an external perspective that isn’t saturated with or poisoned by the affective part of revenge.

You know, I can look at a revenge story and make a moral judgment and say, yeah, she deserves her revenge, or that person deserves their comeuppance… but I’m not making that decision in the heat of the fire of the wrong, affectively speaking.

Devonya: I’m not disagreeing with this, but I want to see if we can further parse this. I mean, there are wrongs that one suffers where you’re like, that sucked, it was a wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily move one to want revenge, right?

I’m wondering, is there something about the quality of the wrong that prompts this desire, this urge for revenge?

Leigh: At least one quality that I would want to identify in revenge is that the wrong has to have made me feel disempowered in some way. I’m borrowing at least part of this from Nietzsche, I mean, I have to be feeling resentful about the fact that this wrong was done to me and I couldn’t… I don’t know… I couldn’t settle it in court, or I couldn’t stand up and say the thing that I should have said or do the thing that I should have done at that moment. And so now I just want to get my revenge.

It’s a way of trying to recapture a certain amount of agency that I believe was stolen from me—wrongly stolen from me.

Rick: What’s interesting here is that I think Spinoza has a way to help us, as you said, Devonya, parse this out a bit more. Because Spinoza’s general position on an affect like revenge—I think he would say it is an affect—is that it’s an account of a situation from the perspective of my thoughts and my body.

It’s not the true account that an external observer would see—like, oh wait, but that wasn’t the cause of that!—but it is from the perspective of the wrong I have felt. It is the story I’m telling, which is often why we might look at a revenge story and say, What the hell are you doing? The slight wasn’t meant.

I’m thinking about The Wrath of Khan here. You know, it was just an accident that the sun went nova and the planet turned into this desert wasteland. Kirk didn’t intend that; he didn’t intend the harm. And so we, from the outside, are like, you’re just a crazy man!

But from the perspective of Khan, he’s telling the same story we’re reading—but from his own perspective. And in that sense, he’s acting on the basis of it.

Devonya: That makes sense. And it raises another question for me about when one’s perception of intentionally being harmed is not an accurate perception, when the narrative issues a harm that might not be an intended harm, or might be the result of simply engaging in business as usual, but it’s experienced as a harm. And I would guess we look differently upon that impetus to revenge in terms of the question of justice or not justice, right?

So what if I feel that I’ve been injured when, in fact, it is not an intentional injury? Or when it is something that might not even objectively be taken as an injury?

Leigh: It doesn’t matter. I mean, I’m sorry to go back to the hurt people hurt people idea, but if you’re hurt, it doesn’t matter if it was intended or not. The hurt is still there.

Devonya: I don’t disagree about the hurt. I think I’m thinking along Rick’s lines where he’s saying if we are taking a step back and parsing whether or not revenge is something we can think of as ethical or just, then the ways in which we’re parsing may have to do with intent, accident, and those sorts of things.

I’m just raising that because I think there are ways in which people pursue revenge—or they announce an intent to pursue revenge—based on things that external observers might say, um, I don’t know if that is an intentional harm.

There may be other ways to adjudicate the experience of injury.

—–

Leigh: Devonya, at the top of the episode, you mentioned one of the questions that you wanted to ask was whether or not there might be something like an ethical revenge. And I’m having a hard time figuring out what that would look like.

That might be because I’ve sort of committed myself to this position that revenge is really solipsistic. And so, in some ways, morality kind of doesn’t exist in that world. But I was wondering if you could tell me what you’re imagining as something like an ethical revenge—what that would look like.

Devonya: Well, when I started thinking about the topic, I polled some of my colleagues about revenge, and I was asking this question about justice. It turns out that I have a colleague who works on something that was entitled indigenous revenge. I’m not sure the colleague still uses that terminology in their work, but I was struck by what seems to me to be a problem of how we deal with historical wrongs and the need to remedy those wrongs in ways that may not be the traditional forms of forgiveness.

Like, what does forgiveness demand, and on whose part? And in what ways do we then begin to actively remedy things?

It seems that often people who are wronged are asked to forgive without any recalibration or any remedy being offered. Forgiveness is often expected to be the ground upon which some sort of remedy can be formulated.

And so I was trying to figure out if it might be possible in certain cases to think about forms of retribution or forms of vengeance enacted on the part of not simply individuals, but social groups. That we might think about that as somehow—I don’t quite want to go to “morally praiseworthy”—but somehow in line with the creation of justice. Along those lines, I was trying to kind of break my brain and think about whether or not these forms of vengeance might be said to be praiseworthy in a larger context.

I think in certain formulations, as philosophers, we would not want to make those things morally praiseworthy, because we wouldn’t necessarily want them to be universal forms of vindication, retribution, or punishment.

Leigh: I think as philosophers, we’d be pretty hard-pressed to find any moral theory that would call vigilantism “morally praiseworthy.” That’s what we’re talking about when we’re saying that someone is taking the world of justice and the world of right and wrong into their own hands.

And moreover, doing so—in the case of the vengeful person—from a bad affective state. I’m not sure that we could find a moral theory that would say that that is a morally praiseworthy action.

I do think that we can, from the outside, look at certain acts of revenge and say, yeah, maybe we don’t want to validate people acting in this way for these reasons… but, you know, things turned out pretty good at the end of the day.

Devonya: When you say that, I mean, would we distinguish vigilantism from something that, say, a “Dexter” is doing?

And for Dave out there, Dexter is a serial killer who has a code where he’s only targeting people who have escaped justice through legal procedures as matters of technicality, and he actually hunts these people down and kills them.

I think the popularity of the series speaks to a certain sense of the ways in which procedures and, often, our mechanisms are not always equipped to capture and render justice in the ways we might want it to.

Leigh: I like the example of Dexter. I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced that Dexter is acting out of revenge.

So, for people who haven’t seen the series, it was originally a Showtime series. It’s also a series of novels. And the character Dexter is so unaffected that it allows him to correct these particular wrongs– like, for example, when people escape legal justice—he very clinically fixes that wrong without ever having to feel motivated by anger or harm or hurt or anything like that.

I mean, he’s really an accountant—a moral accountant—in a way. So I don’t really think that he’s acting in a revengeful way.

But I take your point that maybe we could look at something like what Dexter does as an example of correcting a wrong outside of the regular justice system and say, all right, well, maybe we can find some kind of morally praiseworthy action here.

Rick: I think it’s worth pointing out that Dexter is what we used to call a sociopath, and therefore, as Leigh was pointing out, he has no investment—emotional or even intellectual. The premise of the show is that he’s going to kill anyway, and his father, who was a cop, gave him these rules, saying, “okay, since you’re going to kill anyway, why don’t you only kill bad people?”

Dexter is like, “Okay, I’ll kill only bad people,” but he has no investment in that.

Devonya: Well, he’s got emotional investment in killing. And so, to your point, the father is pointing him toward a less morally ambiguous way in which to engage his affective desire to be a serial killer.

I think part of what I want to push is this: we seem to be moving toward needing to be under cold, rational logic, and removed from emotion, in order to have morally or nearly morally praiseworthy revenge—or in some ways to view revenge as desirable—whereas if it’s emotional, we’re sort of shying away from it.

And that makes me a little uncomfortable. I mean, I think even someone like Aristotle says anger is reasonably motivated in the face of injustice, right? So must we be flat in our affect to have potentially some engagement with ethical forms of revenge, if such a thing were to exist?

I want to say, emotion is important too.

Leigh: I completely agree with you that emotion is important and also that we frequently judge people who are acting from a revengeful state to be hysterical, to be non-rational. And that’s often why, for example, women’s actions are described as revengeful, and not just or whatever.

Devonya: Or spiteful.

Leigh: Or spiteful, yeah. But again, I think that we’re going to be hard-pressed to find a way to morally praise any action that has these two characteristics:

First, it’s almost entirely solipsistic. And I do really think that revenge is solipsistic—so not concerned with the other or the rest of the world or principles of justice or even utilitarian calculations of justice. Just entirely concerned with my feeling of being wronged and wanting revenge for that.

And secondly, I don’t think that we’re going to be able to find morally praiseworthy people who are motivated by that particular kind of negative affect. This is something that Nietzsche really drew out quite well when he talked about ressentiment in The Genealogy of Morals—that there’s something really poisonous about that kind of resentment and revenge.

It’s the affect of a broken person.

Rick: For those of you who are wondering what this ressentiment thing is, I can do nothing better than recommend a past episode we recorded on this very topic, and that will be in the show notes.

Leigh, I want to tease out, though, the solipsistic part here and recall a word you used way back in the conversation that I think we didn’t explore enough, and that is satisfaction.

Because it seems to me that the main moral difficulty with revenge—or, to put that another way, the main difficulty with calling revenge “ethical” or “morally praiseworthy”—is that this satisfaction is my own, right? The one seeking revenge. I’m the one who needs to be satisfied. I’m not satisfying a debt. I’m not satisfying a society or a class.

And secondly, because it’s solipsistic—that is, it’s within me and it’s about me—it’s not entirely clear what would count as satisfying my feeling here. It often happens that almost anything could satisfy this. And I think that if you seek satisfaction in certain ways, no outside observer would say, okay, that was right that you did that.

You know, for example, if someone hits me with their car and runs away, and then I come upon them later and I kill them, I think no one would say, ah, yeah, that revenge was well done, go you! But I still feel satisfied.

And I think these two things—that it’s about me, and it’s about satisfaction that is not necessarily or maybe even ever proportional to the perceived harm—make revenge very difficult to fit into any kind of ethical category or become morally praiseworthy.

Devonya: It sounds to me like we’re drawing a distinction between avenging something—namely a wrong done in the form of some grand injustice or smaller injustice—contrasted with a personal satisfaction in doing some kind of harm for harm received, and adjudicating this sense of purpose.

It sounds to me like we’re getting to a point where we’re saying revenge is not the same as avenging or leaning into vengeance as a just form of punishment.

Leigh: I think that’s exactly right. And I think that’s why acts of revenge are often described as petty. Because, at the end of the day, it really is just about you feeling better.

You know, like I said before, it’s not about the other person getting their comeuppance. It’s about you getting yours—you getting your sense of satisfaction.

Rick: And I get that partly by thinking or perceiving that the other got their comeuppance, but because it’s, again, all from the way I’m perceiving this, I can be entirely wrong about that.

And that’s the difficulty here with revenge versus avenging.

Devonya: Okay.

Rick: But Leigh, I’ve been thinking in the back of my mind that somehow this is related to the question of restorative justice, and maybe I’m wrong about this, but most cases of restorative justice forbid acts of revenge as a condition for entering the process—precisely for many of the reasons we’ve been raising here. I’ll say one more: when I take revenge, I open the door for a perpetual cycle of revenge. I have in mind the Hatfields and the McCoys, right? It just goes on and on and on.

Now I’m taking revenge for the most recent slight or harm, but this is just a cycle that continues.

Leigh: I think that’s exactly right. I don’t think there is any theory of justice that is going to validate revenge. I don’t think there’s any moral theory that is going to validate revenge.

Devonya: Yeah, I can see that. And I think, for me, part of the conflation is that to enact the action of avenging something seems bound up with this term revenge.

I don’t think about it in the solipsistic terms. I think if we’re labeling revenge as a solipsistic pursuit of satisfaction that can only be adjudicated by the internal dimensions of the individual who is enacting actions that will bring about satisfaction for a harm that they perceive themselves to have experienced, then that’s something entirely outside of the realm of moral theory in the ways that we’re talking about it. We can’t think about it as an ethical thing. There is no normative standard that we can put into place that makes that justify it.

Leigh: It’s also so idiosyncratic, right? I mean, it can’t be normative. All acts of revenge are going to be so tied up with the specific wrong, the specific circumstances, and the specific effect it had on the specific psychology of a specific person.

Rick: Yeah. And I can think of a lot of sitcoms in which the act of revenge is so petty in relation to the wrong that was done. So someone causes me to have to get stitches, and as an act of revenge, I steal their pencil, or something like that.

But that also makes me think there are other normative categories that are not ethical or moral that I think we’ve been playing with.

I’ve not seen any of the films in the series, but you all have been talking about Kill Bill. And I think what you’re claiming is that this is a sweet story of revenge—that is, you’re applying aesthetic criteria to it. That’s also normative, but it’s not ethical.

When we look at acts of revenge, we could say, you know, I don’t approve, but man, that was nice.

Leigh: It was beautiful. I mean, this is such a good point because I think you’re exactly right about that.

You know, when you hear about the execution of a well-crafted revenge story, yeah, maybe I’m not going to say that was right or that was just, but man, that was pretty—it was really beautiful.

I think also one of the things that we have to remember is that often, when people find themselves embracing revenge, it’s because not only are they hurt or harmed, but also often they feel helpless, right?

Like, I don’t have any other way to make this right. This is not going to be made right. And so I want to feel better about it. And the way that I’m going to feel better about it is I’m going to get my revenge.

I’m sure this is true for all of us, but I certainly can confess for myself that there have been some things done to me in my life where there was no avenue for balancing the scales, for making it just, for making it right.

And I sat on that stuff for a long time and very frequently thought to myself, oh, if I could just get my revenge, that “getting my revenge” is the only thing out there for me.

I’m not just hurt. I’m also helpless.

Rick: Yeah.

Devonya: And maybe that’s the cathartic aspect of movies like Kill Bill or Fist of Fury—that we see the person who was in a powerless position transform from that powerless position into someone who can, in fact, avenge the wrong.

Rick: And I think it’s not just cathartic for the audience. I think part of Leigh’s point is that revenge itself is an attempt at catharsis in the face of my inability to do anything that would balance the scales or bring about justice. I can relieve myself of the pain I’m feeling by means of this act that I wreak on the person who has injured me.

Devonya: Yeah, and that has a deep appeal.

Rick: Yeah.

Leigh: It’s beautiful.

Devonya: And I struggle with being a person who experiences the world often as someone grappling with an imbalance of power—where I am often powerless to, say, get rid of something like racism in the world or anti-Blackness. There’s something about avenging certain wrongs that has a deep appeal and that, for me, aligns with this idea of existing in a world that, as King would say, tends toward the arc of justice rather than the opposite.

And that’s the part where, when we talk about revenge as not being ethically sound, or there being no possibility of an ethical revenge, I want to disagree, even though I have no good argumentative grounds to put that forth. I just keep thinking… well, there’s got to be some kind of satisfaction.

Leigh: Okay, so maybe let me float a possibility for giving an argument for the ethical grounds of vengeance or revenge. Like, this is going to require some intellectual gymnastics, but stick with me here for a second.

Often, the person who is intent on revenge is acting on the basis of what we sometimes call a personal vendetta, right? From the same word: vengeance.

That reminds me of the film V for Vendetta, where one of the things that happened in the film was that people came to see that their vendetta was not personal. It was collective. And it therefore motivated a kind of collective revenge.

But again, I think the moment it becomes collective, it stops being revenge. It starts being something else.

Rick: Still, in that example… what’s the character’s name who wears the mask originally?

Leigh: Guy Fawkes.

Devonya: V.

Rick: In that example, Guy is still seeking revenge, even though other people realize, wait, I’ve been wronged too, and they act collectively in a way to bring about justice… while he, I think the movie shows, is still seeking satisfaction.

Leigh: Yeah.

Rick: And I think you could see a difference between the ethical judgment we might make of his going about what he’s going about, and then when other people sign on to the sort of revolution, their actions.

Leigh: But you could still see, though, that coming to see that your vendetta is not a personal vendetta might draw you away from being motivated by revenge and back to being motivated by justice.

Devonya: And I like this distinction between seeking my own personal satisfaction contrasted with coming to understand the wrong I have experienced personally as part of a larger and collective structure of wrong that needs to be remedied. We can think about that as some kind of collective vengeance in the sense of just punishment.

And I like that as a distinction because we can see how the desire for revenge may motivate the building of collectivities around an acknowledgment and recognition of wrong done—not simply the desire to have personal satisfaction.

Leigh: Although I do think that we have to proceed with caution here, of course, because in the real world, frequently, that is not how it happens, right?

I mean, more frequently how it happens is like, for example, what happened after 9/11. I think that there were a number of years where we were a vengeful nation. We were a nation with a vendetta.

And, you know, you could say things worked out well—if you’re a lefty—in  V for Vendetta, but it hasn’t actually worked out all that well in the real world.

Rick: Right. And to go back to a point I made earlier, notice that in the response that the U.S. had to 9/11, satisfaction was sought in ways that had nothing to do with the harm that was caused or the people who caused the harm.

Leigh: Yeah.

Rick: And I know, in talking to many people, they felt great satisfaction in invading Afghanistan and Iraq. So the satisfaction felt was really solipsistic and divorced from the harm that was experienced.

Leigh: Exactly.

Devonya: And the proportionality was not adjudicated narrowly enough to respond to the harm experienced. And even—is that possible?

I’m wondering if we might think of retribution here, as Leigh used the term earlier, vindictive. I get the sense of a little bit of pettiness, like, I just want the satisfaction of seeing someone experience a harm because it is satisfying to see them experience a harm in return.

Like missing their pencil because they gave me stitches.

Maybe this is the beauty of these normative aesthetic categories of revenge that Rick pointed out. Something beautiful about those is that they are a kind of template. Most of those stories that we gravitate toward, that we look at and accept as theater or drama, are stories that hold our attention, that give us some kind of individual and personal satisfaction are stories where justice is being brought back into balance, so to speak.

And I think, Leigh, you’re right to point out that’s not always what happens in real life. But as we draw upon examples, it seems to me that there’s something that keeps recurring in the kinds of film examples that are far more satisfying than not.

Leigh: Yeah. And again, it’s important to keep in mind that the satisfaction that we feel as viewers is not the satisfaction of revenge, but the satisfaction of justice.

Devonya: Ah, finally, the universe is as it should be! The bad guy is not getting away with it! And maybe there’s some kind of restoration for the person who suffered the wrong.

Leigh: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think this is going to be a surprise to anybody here or any of our listeners, but my disposition is designed such that I don’t think that I feel any greater pleasure than when seeing people who’ve done wrong get their comeuppance.

That really is my greatest pleasure.

And so often, when I’m not seeing that in my personal life, I’m motivated to want to pursue a vendetta. But that never works out for me because, even if I pursued the vendetta and even if I brought harm on the person who harmed me, I’m never going to feel that true pleasure of, you know, the satisfaction of justice.

I’m only going to feel the minor pleasure of the satisfaction of revenge.

Rick: Right. An aesthetic pleasure. There is clearly a pleasure in seeing beautiful, sweet, nice things, but it’s not the same pleasure as the pleasure in seeing that the universe is restored to justice.

Leigh: Right.

Devonya: Yeah.

——–

Leigh: One of the things I wanted to talk about before we have to get out of here is how technology has made it possible for us to be more vengeful and less justice-oriented.

I think that there are a lot of relatively new human phenomena that have happened in the last 25 years or so that are basically examples of revenge but are only possible because of developments in technology. So, I’m thinking, for example, of cancel culture, right?

Many people would say that there’s a kind of vengeful, vendetta-based manner about people being canceled online or whatever. And that’s not even to mention just online harassment in general. I mean, of course, it makes it much easier to plot your revenge if you can actually enact it anonymously, which many people do.

Then perhaps one of the grossest examples is this phenomenon of what they call revenge porn. These guys who get broken up with or whatever, and then they post compromising pictures or videos of their exes online as a way to address the hurt that they feel for having been rejected romantically.

So, I’m just wondering if you think that maybe it’s possible that the reason we see this new spike in the use of the words revenge and vengeance is because it’s easier to be vengeful now.

Devonya: And deep fakes are part of that. Even if they are not real pictures, which you referred to as revenge porn. I know of deep fakes, where you’re reproducing things that seem to be images of past romantic interests in compromising positions—when in fact they didn’t even do it—are becoming pretty prevalent.

Rick: I would like to put out of this conversation—and maybe I’m wrong— “cancel culture,” because I think that it is sometimes revenge-motivated, but it’s more complicated than that. And as I’ve said before on this podcast, and other guests have said, you have the complete and total right to be an asshole, but you don’t have the complete and total right to have a platform to be an asshole. And so I think that for me to participate in the canceling of someone is not necessarily an act of revenge… versus revenge porn, I mean, it’s right there in the name, first of all, but secondly, it’s lashing out at someone for a perceived wrong and causing a worse wrong than the one that was initially felt.

I think the same thing with Devonya’s example of using deep fakes to put someone in a compromising position. Those seem to be revenge-laden and I think there are easier ways to do this in public now, which is part of the satisfaction. If other people can witness the revenge I’m taking, then it’s that much sweeter.

I think that’s what new technologies allow—for me to bring my revenge to the public.

Leigh: Yeah. I just want to agree with your point, Rick. I also hate the term “cancel culture.”

But I do want to say that one of the things that we saw, for example, in the #MeToo movement, which is coincidentally where we got the term “cancel culture”—or, “cancel culture” as a term arose contemporaneously with the #MeToo movement—what we saw happening there were people, women mostly, who had been hurt, had been harmed, and had no way for it to be made right. The justice system was failing them. Social mores were failing them. And this, I do think, looked a little bit like revenge.

And I’m not saying that in a critical way. I’m also not calling that morally praiseworthy way.

But it was a way of hurt people hurting people

Devonya: By calling it out?

Leigh: Yeah, by making these wrongs public, by naming names.

Devonya: Ah, okay. And I do think some people named names and some people simply identified with “MeToo”. That’s a further shade of distinction—that there are ways in which one identifies versus “I’m calling this person out” in ways that can’t be tested or verified. I’m just listing names.

Leigh: But I also just want to say that I think just identifying with the #MeToo movement—so the millions of women who just tweeted #MeToo, just indicating I also have had something like this done to me—that is also naming names. It’s just that the name is all of us, right?

It’s like, “this is the society that we’re living in.”

Devonya: Is that naming names, or is that a mode of solidarity? Because I think of that a little differently than naming names.

Leigh: It’s an indication of a solidarity that recognizes that society is failing to do anything about this problem and the justice system is failing to give anyone recourse to correcting these wrongs.

Rick: But that seems, Leigh, to be very similar to the model of V for Vendetta that you were talking about. Namely, an individual’s revenge is now recognized as collective and becomes more in the vein of avenging, whereas, there’s no #MeToo for revenge porn because that’s just pure revenge.

Devonya: Right. And to go back to your point about cancel culture, I think there are instances of people being canceled in ways that I think would align with revengeful action. Namely, they are said to have done X or Y, and it snowballs, and they get social media pushback that is unwarranted or unverified in terms of what they’ve been accused of doing. That has resulted in people being asked to cancel them.

And I do think that’s different than, as Rick was saying, I am not required to listen to you because you’re a jerk or an asshole.

Rick: I mean, it also seems to me that there’s the kind of reverse of what we’ve been talking about—namely when an injustice that is collectively experienced becomes more personalized and turns into revenge. And I have in mind here Donald Trump, who I think is very good at taking what is a collective injustice and personalizing it, making it solipsistic, such that everyone seeks revenge, rather than justice.

Devonya: So that it becomes vindictive rather than an occasion when we need to change the way we do things in order to create a more just society or situation.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Devonya: Would you add exceptionalism to the solipsistic aspects of revenge? I mean, I’m thinking about that as we’re closing out with Trump and #MeToo, but I wonder if another aspect of the solipsism that Leigh was talking about in terms of revenge is also a kind of exceptionalism—that I ought to be able to do this. Not that anyone should be able to do this.

Leigh: Well, I think any solipsistic position is also exceptionalist, right? Because it’s just about you.

Devonya: And I am the exception.

Leigh: Exactly. Right. Yeah.

Well, unfortunately, our bartender is giving us last call, but Devonya, I really appreciate you bringing this up as a topic for us to talk about today. It had never really occurred to me—I hadn’t ever considered revenge philosophically at all. And this was just a really fantastic opportunity, and I think we made some progress in this conversation.

Rick: Yeah, and last call, by the way, is an act of avenging, not revenge.

Devonya: Gathering up all the strands.

Rick: Good night, y’all.

Leigh: Good night.

Devonya: Good night.