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You have the corpse, and you are, thereafter, at the mercy of a fact which missed the truth, which means that the corpse has you. — James Baldwin

I want revenge.[1] I think you do too. It’s in the air. It is the signature of our moment. While the spirit of vengeance has been banished from “the Left” for quite some time it haunts us still. Can we deny the rage we feel with at the impunity of police? The vicious outright lies of reactionaries? The systemic murder and terror and everyday grinding injustice directed to women, trans folks, people of colour and Indigenous people? The arson attacks against mosques and refugee housing that goes largely unremarked? The entirely predictable terror attacks against civilians that only serve to re-entrench and embolden reactionaries on both “sides” of the alleged clash of civilizations? How else can we respond to a ruling class and a system of global capitalism that has led to the completely unnecessary deaths of millions upon millions of poor, overwhelmingly non-white people from starvation, lack of potable water or easily preventable disease? How else can we behave towards the naked collusion of capitalist interests to sabotage any meaningful action on climate change and other dimensions of wholesale ecological destruction while fully aware of the humanitarian consequences? What other sentiment is appropriate towards the progenitors of the evils of mass incarceration, the wholesale destruction of the urban fabric euphemized as gentrification, or the obscene denial of care towards so many of us? How can we forgive and forget when our precious time on the earth with one another is being needlessly wasted by unpayable debts and useless work and endless, endless worry? And with our global imperialist warlords toying with the future of life on earth in their hypermasculine nuclear wargames, who would dare tell us that our desire for vengeance is illegitimate?

But then why does talk of vengeance shake us to our cores? When and where did we learn to fear the fantasies of political revenge that, despite our best efforts, still animate some part of us, individually and collectively? What do we make of living in an age when revenge politics is on the rise, though so far largely monopolized by the resurgent right? Can we fathom late — or, better, belated — capitalism as a system of revenge against those whom it exploits and abandons? And is there a radical theory of revenge worthy of us, whose rage for justice no doubt springs, ultimately, from some deep reservoir of compassion?

These questions are the subject of a book I am writing. Here I want to offer a few notes on how we might excavate the foundations of a materialist theory of revenge. Beyond moralism about the evils of vengeance, though without blithely ignoring the evils justified in the name of vengeance, I want to to suggest that the type of revenge politics that are helping to bring right-wing authoritarians to power today have systemic and structural roots in the architecture of global capitalism. Indeed, while neoliberal intellectuals suggest that the state and the market have, hand in hand, banished vengeance to the margins of political life, I propose that vengeance is more at the core of the global capitalist system than ever. And if we are to respond to it well, we need to dwell with the power of a tender revolutionary avenging. Revenge, of course, has always walked beside us humans, and reliably offers to take us by the hand in our pain. It is the subject of great cultural works in perhaps all civilizations. But the question that animates my project is this: is there something about capitalism, especially our moment of neoliberal global financialized capitalism, that elevates revenge to the level of a general symptom and a constitutive structure?

In this essay, I have started with an examination of the theme of revenge in a certain Marxist genealogy only to quite quickly seek to show the limits and often unrealized potentials of these resources, instead turning to feminist and anti-colonial thinkers for clues. I see this piece as more of an incomplete militant research dossier than a comprehensive argument. It was written between two significant and momentous weeks: the first marked by the massive protests that greeted the January 2017 inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th President of the United States, the second the week in August of that year that began with a deadly neonazi terrorist attack in Charlottesville, Virginia that killed one anti-fascist demonstrator and ended with the dismissal of Trump’s friend, chief ideologue and special advisor Steven Bannon from the White House. Bannon plays a key role in this essay.

I hasten to clarify that in thinking through the concept of “avenging” I do not simply mean the infamous vengeance of the guillotine or the firing squad: our forebears (especially our foremothers) have warned us well enough, and many of us (not me) have witnessed the violent terrors revenge can unleash. Nor am I advocating revenge as an all-consuming, singular fixation directed towards individuals. Rather, in contradistinction to revenge, I am interested in how swearing an oath to avenge the wrongs done by capitalism to our bodies, our communities, our ancestors, our children, our time and the-earth-of-which-we-are-a-part might manifest through a politics of generative refusals, of reclaiming the means of social reproduction, and of the radical imagination. In other words, I am interested less in revenge upon the architects and beneficiaries of this system than in a more holistic avenging of its crimes and cruelties. While the former might imply apocalyptic violence, the latter might imply a more generative passion.

I have here employed a range of theories and methodologies to seek to describe revenge as at once a symptom and a structure, a maligned promise and an all-too present absence, a rallying cry and a lament. Whether this essay is a promissory note or a ransom note is yet to be determined.