Psychic movement from revenge to redemption in Götz Spielmann’s Revanche (2008)*

Background

A dictionary definition of revenge describes it as “the action of inflicting hurt or harm on someone for an injury or wrong suffered at their hands.”† This definition points to revenge as an action not confined to the verbal domain, and, as such, seems to pose a challenge for psychoanalytic talk. This difficulty seems to be reflected in the absence of the term in The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (Bott Spillius et al. 2011). One can wonder why such a major phenomenon in human existence, which has been addressed by literature throughout history,† has been only meagrely theorized in psychoanalysis. This also contrasts with

the treatment of other sources of suffering such as fear, greed, or guilt which are thoroughly discussed (Akhtar 2014). I assume that it is because revenge is a particularly aggressive form of action that it is most difficult to deal with through the analytic encounter, posing as it does a direct threat to the transference relationship. One might argue that this relative success of poetic discourse, of which a film may be a particular instance, is due to its ability to withhold the mimetic attributes of disturbing phenomena, thus keeping the subject at a safe distance from them (Aristotle [450 B.C.]). The cinematic image is particularly suited for this purpose as it involves a unique pendulum movement (Deleuze 1983, 1985; Heath 1976; Metz 1977; Oudart 1977), enabling the viewer to be in remarkably close contact, while maintaining a safe and aesthetic distance, nevertheless experiencing usually unrevealed, and at times intimidating pre-verbal, primitive states of being. Moreover, in order to tackle the pre-verbal aspects of the revenge phenomenon, I turn to a specifically poetic genre of film. This style of film, which is defined in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s writings (1965, 1