Rache

Modernity claims to have happily overcome revenge and replaced it with the rule of law. Since the Enlightenment, revenge has been regarded not only as the antithesis of law but also as the dark other of modernity itself. In his extensive cultural-historical investigation, Fabian Bernhardt reads this largely unchallenged narrative of progress against the grain. Batman stands alongside Achilles, and Marcel Mauss encounters Immanuel Kant. In his philosophical reflection, with a cultural-anthropological approach and a keen sensitivity to the mass cultural imaginary, he demonstrates that the delegitimization of revenge has also led to a theoretical obscuration. The organizing significance of revenge in so-called primitive societies is regularly overlooked, as is the role that the desire for retribution still plays, albeit unacknowledged, in modern societies. Revenge not only reveals the dark side of justice, but it also brings forth those repressed energies and affects that seem to have no legitimate place in modern existence.