Revenge

Seeking revenge is an anarchist principle; a principled ethics of doing wrong to those that have done wrong to us. The taste (and completion) of revenge is like honey; and if one does nothing to remove it, the injustice persists. In general, principles can move us; and, in particular, emotions may carry us to qualitative avenues, forestalling ontological pessimism, possessed mutilation, or passive nihilism. By this family of resemblances, I mean the sense that one need not do anything, or worse, that there is nothing worth doing, given some weird argument for efficient action. In other words, getting angry is one way to overcome an over-all sense of indifference—the sense in which one has been rendered indifferent. But why does one have to become angry? This is precisely where revenge fits. Given that revenge could suffice to auto-move us to anger, revenge is a plausible candidate for clarifying genuine against-ness, genuine “active indifference” that completely bypasses the problem of getting or becoming angry because one is not yet so.  A good candidate for distinguishing when one is angry versus when one isn’t really so, seems to be revenge.

But this point is merely on the way to another point that we wish to explain. We think solidarity is premised on a false sense of against-ness. We hope that we might explain why allyship (disingenuous against-ness) fails, by setting out the boundaries of being angry, or <seeking revenge>. For it is our guiding hypothesis that most anarchists do not act from revenge, but attempt to piggyback on another’s revenge.

We mean to argue that friendship is structured artificially in activist circles because this piggybacking is in part determined by a narrative of pity and guilt. But what if we jumpstart our hearts in another way? What if instead of trying to structure friendship from ideology, we turn the matter around and grow with our friends? What if instead of trying to find people we feel obligated to agree with, we start by acting with those that we like?

2. Nietzsche theorized equality in terms of pity: One is made to feel as though equality across the board is Just, even though, evidently, one doesn’t see others necessarily as ones’ equals (con-sentiment). The problem of making a claim on someone else (justice) is that it has to first meet a sense in the other that is correct, or proper fitting; or else one has become so self-sacrificial that anyone to come might open them to charity. If we see that Justice is ambiguous, we have warrant to purge the last qualification below:

“<anger> as a longing, accompanied by pain, for a real or apparent revenge, for a real or apparent slight, affecting a [persyn] or one of [their] friends, when such a slight is undeserved.” (Aristotle, 1378a)

Under this reading, anger is qualified as appropriate given just cause, that X has had something undeserved done to them. Yet the idea of being undeserved implies that all the dudes could get together and agree, as though principles are intuitive. Is Aristotle suggesting here that one might only feel the need for revenge in the context of an undeserved slight? Well, then, imagine the situation in which two persyns are talking, the one cautioning the other to not act because they deserved it. Clearly these two could not be said to be sharing the feeling because they disagree on the justice of the matter. What I want to talk about is this concept of shared feeling, and how we go about trying to create it, given that, as Aristotle gestures, we can feel it already with our friends, and, as I would add, even if not everyone would necessarily agree with how we see it.

3. If friends feel our pain already, as Aristotle notes, isn’t it because they identify with us, in the sense of having a kind of being that is identical? And if so, might we say that this is not a matter of crossing a distance? But then doesn’t this spell out a precise issue with identity politics given that this is so often a matter of relating, identifying, so often a matter of crossing vast differences in solidarity?

Friends are those that we love not because they are such and such. Giorgio Agamben says that friendship is neither a quality nor a property of a subject (What is an Apparatus, 31): “Calling someone friend is not the same as calling them, ‘white’, ‘Italian’ or ‘hot’” (ibid.,) That is to say: friendship is not just a relationship between two separate individuals, joined together by common natures, but is an expansion of the self into the other, and vice versa, so that pain, happiness, or whatever, felt by one, is already felt by the other. Con-sentiment is precisely shared feeling from below, a question of transcendental immanence, a question of beings living, fighting and dying together; not an abstract similarity, or a subsequent division of beings imposed from above (ibid., 34). This links back to Aristotle’s definition of anger: Our friends are those that really share our feelings and really want what’s best. So because both obligation and pity seem to implicate a distance to be crossed, a not yet identification, a rupture in con-sentiment, we ask, as our down-going starting point for friendship, exactly this: When is motivation neither obligation nor pity? For when there isn’t real friendship, guilt or pity is required to cross the distance, or close the gap, between (I can relate to that) and (I’m already laying plans). But surely this distance never genuinely contracts. As Aristotle says: “The persons men (sic.) pity are those whom they know, provided they are not too close connected with them; for if they are, they feel the same as if they themselves were likely to suffer.” (1386a12ff)

4. An appeal to pity is seen as unjustified in some contexts because it derails rational self-interest. Victimization tends towards an analogous derailment. For it nearly goes without saying that those structured without victimization (by a domesticating apparatus) are guilted into acting for those that identify with their own victimhood. The standard critique here is that one should be able to act for themselves, that, if they have the capacity to manipulate with ressentiment, one should be able to muster up enough strength; for victimization is hardly liberating given that its product is a species of codependency.

But there are legitimate moments of pity, or at least moments not caused deliberately by one that is trying to capitalize on their structured victimization. However, the identity apparatus, even after it has been qualified with intersectionality, necessarily produces the conditions for pity by reifying conditions for victimization. The problem here is that all are made un-free via a domesticating morality, while only some—those with a stake in the design of the mechanism—get to define liberatory politics for everyone.

Perhaps it would be here objected that we are just as obligated by the friend. Am I compelled to act for my friends, as I am compelled to act for those that would manipulate me with pity and guilt?
Here we sense that a friend might have become a property of an other, in the sense of an expectancy—what are friends for?—but in this, Obligation does its darkest work. For we think it is a sign of disingenuous friendship that one expects something from their “friends”. The important point is that friends permit options to each other because they care about one another. We do not possess our friends; our friends possess us and we possess them. And we hold space for our friends precisely because we do not wish to put them in a box of obligation, precisely because we care. This requires a denial of complete self-interest in all parties involved, an endlessness, a growth in power-with. Allyship, on the other hand, is a giving away of most self-interest in oneself to the complete interests of another. Rather than doing the hard indeterminate and consequentialist work of an ethics of power-with, it is an end to individual interest, and an entering into an asymmetrical power network that merely inverts perceived (socially constructed) power-to, in a new morality for the world some want to create. The best pragmatic ethical programme is to let individual bodies be to find their own desires and those that let them get away with whatever; or, at least, this seems more liberatory than a morality that would seek a domesticated behavior for all, a morality, that cannot define the free aspect of free association. (For us, free association only means something if one can dissociate without consequent punishment; it means the freedom to be left alone; yet, with the effort of mass movement building being under the surface in most activist moralities, freedom is a fucking joke.)

A friend, if you’ll recall, is one that we love not because they are such and such, but because we share something beyond a project or ideas: because we share a form of life, an already-existence, not justified by similar essences. Allies are not friends; for allies are those that we relate to because they are such and such. The ally is the seeming friend that “claims” your help with the cunning strength of Obligation, and the hidden implication of Pity or Guilt. Allyship, then, is at best that attempt to generate a paper-thin feeling of friendliness in another that is not obviously a friend.

5. The ruminating thought here is that we either have hearts that are in it because the principled act is for our friends, or we do not have hearts that are in it. And if we do not have hearts that are in it, must we ask how we might grow larger hearts? For whom? Prima facie, it’s down right foolish to love the other that would just as quickly manipulate us to love them if we do not respond adequately. And perhaps the real reason, after all this, is that the one that would force us to love them, the one that would guilt us to care, is our enemy.

In the least, if one has wronged us or one of our friends, Aristotle points us to a shared feeling between friends (con-sentiment) that is different in kind from those that we pity, those with whom we are not close. The other that we can empathize with is not the friend, because we have to go about orienting ourselves to their needs, pitying them. And to do this, we have to replace our lack of knowledge about them as individuals, as potential friends, relying solely on how they occur—or more factually—how we take them to be, essentially, under the activist apparatus of imposed identities. This other might boost our anger, if we are open to them, if they do not put us off with obligation; but we might not be moved.—And not because we are never moved; but rather because it takes resilience—and courage!—to discover things that genuinely move us!

Above we indexed what we mean by con-sentiment by noting that in the network of friendship one has to relinquish complete self-interest. And we used this articulation to trouble the notion of ally-politics, noting, almost trivially, that such is a denial of complete self-interest. Derrida’s “My Friends, there are no friends” suggests that perhaps the friendship model only produces lone wolves that desire revenge. But perhaps not. Perhaps. And so, we say revenge (or genuine against-ness) is strongest, in the sense of life-affirming growth, when it is exacted for friends, and with friends, or, when it is exacted for, and by, oneself. And we affirm that revenge is weakest when it is within the framing of allyship, when the relation between bodies is structured as a distance that requires closing to carry out the trick of feeling. This closing as “bad faith”—whereby essence displaces con-sentiment (shared existence)—can be noticed best in the hidden, but attendant, rhetoric of pity, and its contrary, but functionally redoubling consequence: guilt.