Revenge, etymologically, is from the Old French word vengier, meaning to claim, set free or punish, and the prefix ‘re’ stresses the direction – it’s a reaction targeting ‘back’ to the causer. In other words, ‘revenge’ means the setting free of a desire to inflict punishment in return (usually for injury or insult).
This desire for revenge can easily be noticed in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet and García Márquez’s
Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The unjust act, in the former is the murder of Old Hamlet by his brother Claudius, and in the latter is the deflowering of Angela Vicario, which is discovered on the night of her wedding. Hamlet reacts to this by killing Claudius and in a like manner, Angela’s twin brothers, Pedro and Pablo respond to the injury inflicted upon their sister by killing Santiago Nasar, a person named by her when she is pressed as to who the ‘real’ perpetrator is. The irrationality of Pedro and Pablo’s revenge is conspicuous while the one of Hamlet is rather subtle (and this begs a thorough scrutiny in the future). But one commonality regarding the revenge in these two texts is that the act of revenge is carried out on behalf of the victim. This means in these two texts, the avenger acts in the name of, or as the agent of the victim, rather than being the victim himself or herself. This is a reaction by means of substitution – the avenger substituting the victim in inflicting the punishment upon the avenged. In other words, this is a revenge done in the form of substitution for an ‘other’. This other, on one level, is the victim deemed dear and valuable to the avenger. But on a collective and metaphorical level, this sense of the ‘other’ can refer to what Heidegger calls ‘they-hood’, which is present in the ‘they-self’ in each of us.
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