"On Revenge"

Revenge moves in shadows—never wholly absent, never fully revealed. It lingers not as an outburst, but as sediment: slow, narrative, dangerous. It fascinates most when it is not supposed to exist. In societies that elevate forgiveness to the rank of virtue, in cultures founded upon the Christian imperative of the other cheek, revenge becomes more than transgression—it becomes mythopoetic residue. Its allure lies precisely in its refusal to conform, in its refusal to be quiet. Within moral ecologies saturated by mercy, revenge pulses with the force of a secret heresy.

Early encounters with this force were clothed in narrative elegance. The Count of Monte Cristo did not simply tell a story of wrong and retaliation; it built a cathedral of moral architecture where justice, denied by institutions, returns masked in vengeance. Edmond Dantès does not avenge through impulse—he composes retribution like a fugue, patient and symmetrical. In him, revenge ceases to be chaos and becomes form. But even here, in Dumas’ pages, the seduction is not the cruelty, but the symmetry. The world, having broken him asymmetrically, is repaid in perfect geometric response.

Years later, Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy ripped away the veil. In Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and Lady Vengeance, the choreography of retaliation becomes lurid, erotic, posthuman. What is reclaimed is not balance, but affective intensity. These are not stories of justice, but of implosion—of selfhood so saturated by betrayal that retribution becomes the only imaginable syntax. Here, revenge is not a return to order, but a disruption of it. Not restoration, but disturbance.

This subterranean logic of vengeance—its grammar, its rhythm—emerged again, unexpectedly, in the voices of migrant storytellers. Not in fiction, but in narrative interviews. In De Vindicta et Resistentia: The Failure of Migrants’ Narrative Resistance and the Emergence of Revenge Narratives, the terrain is no longer literary or cinematic. It is social, affective, intimate. The narrators do not act out revenge in spectacle. They narrate it. They conjure it through memory, tone, and silence. And in that conjuring, something far more politically potent is revealed.

The migrants whose stories shaped that research had first attempted resistance—narrative resistance, the kind that hopes to interrupt dominant frames. Against the Threat Narrative and the Integration Challenge Narrative—those cultural mechanisms that depict migrants as violent, incompatible, or burdensome—counter-narratives had been crafted with care. Tales of peacefulness, diligence, obedience. But when these stories failed to alter perception, when moral clarity was met with bureaucratic suspicion or everyday betrayal, something fractured.

Out of that fracture, revenge did not emerge as fury. It emerged as style.

Rachid, wrongly implicated by association and cast out of a social circle, withdrew from the logic of reform and began to imagine a scenario of poetic reversal. His exclusion no longer sought rectification; it began to desire exposure. Others, like Jaineba, retaliated through the slow machinery of community, circulating refusal and shaping economic consequence. These are not merely acts of anger. They are aesthetic choices—narrative revisions that no longer seek entry, but return gaze with fracture.

There is a haunting beauty in the timing of these transitions. The counter-narrative collapses not with a scream, but with a shift in rhythm. The speaker no longer hopes to be heard as innocent, but to be known as injured. The revenge narrative, then, is not simply what follows failure—it is what failure makes possible. It is the second tempo of resistance.

The cultural force of these stories is amplified in the very soil that seeks to suppress them. In Christian-inflected political cultures—where public virtues are shaped by the beatitudes and civic discourse repeats the catechisms of tolerance—the figure of the revenger becomes uncontainable. The subject who refuses to forgive, who names injustice without recourse to reform, unsettles the entire performance of moral modernity. In such a world, revenge is not simply improper—it is sublime.

Narratively, revenge disobeys the arc of redemption. It does not culminate in reconciliation or closure. It loops, destabilizes, repositions. In this sense, the revenge narratives I encountered were not aberrations. They were corrections. Not of reality, but of narrative dominance. They disrupted the expected telos of integration and offered instead a politics of wounded memory.

The lexicon of cultural studies has often flirted with such acts. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, revenge becomes a “minor literature”—a mode of telling that deterritorializes major languages of virtue, complicity, and belonging. It is not opposition alone that defines these narratives, but their capacity to rearrange the coordinates of morality itself. They do not merely say: I was harmed. They say: the moral world that expects me to forgive has already failed me.

Such a refusal is not nihilistic. It is epistemological.

In my article, what began as an investigation into the limits of narrative resistance became a meditation on vengeance as discursive survival. When migrants are asked to integrate, what they are often asked to do is to forget—to forget the indignity of suspicion, the bureaucratic violence of delay, the coldness of legal languages that record suffering without recognizing it. Revenge, in this context, is not the opposite of peace—it is the refusal of forgetfulness.

This refusal materializes not only in what is said, but in how it is said. Intonation carries the weight of betrayal. Temporal shifts mark the moment hope recedes. Irony blooms where sincerity once lived. These are not aesthetic flourishes; they are structural acts. They rewrite the very architecture of what counts as a legitimate story.

Revenge is not always a scream. Often, it is a whisper. But that whisper unsettles entire narrative economies. In Christian cultures, in liberal democracies, in humanitarian frameworks—where the ideal subject is the grateful sufferer, the disciplined supplicant—revenge refuses decorum. It stains the discourse. And in that stain, it reveals the limits of the moral imagination.

What fascinates is not that revenge exists. It is that it insists—in the very places that claim to have outgrown it.