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Revenge is one of the ways that we humans, subjects of representation, have of mediating the cruelty of the past. Indeed, without representation and a sense of temporality, there is no revenge: its setting is the obsessively imagined future and its most relished mode is the anticipation of long-awaited justice. Psychoanalytically, it serves as a structure of fantasy, kindled privately in the imagination, a repeatedly savored secret victory over the object of its passion. In its internalization and elaboration of an internal object relation, revenge is similar to the sexual fantasy, one in which passion is saturated by hatred. In the fantasy of vengeance, traumatic loss is thus alchemized to the victory of knowing. Its love letter might read: It is only you I think of now, no one else will do, for in this world of happenstance, I bask in the knowledge of your future; you may enjoy happiness now but, unbeknownst to you, yet known to me, your fate is fully in my hands, and in that lies my triumph.
Freud, of course, understood this powerful engine of expiation as a motive force in psychological development: to marry the mother, kill the father. The king is only king for a day, after all. Adult erotic attachment is a