a carnival of outrage.

"it is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and that they are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable."*

arendt says the only way to temper the morning train of uncertainty leaving the station of uncontrollable human action is through absolution and avowal: forgive them, father, for they know not what they do. ou bien, "si algun alma pecare por equivocacion, entonces tiene que presentar una cabra en su primer ano como ofrenda por el pecado."* que la lectrice choisisse elle-meme. in any case, i've just unwittingly sneezed on the spanish language bible. i know not what i do, to say the least. (and to think my roommates actually had a copy laying around - twas next to trotsky's 'historia de la revolucion rusa,' in case you were wondering). it's amazing what google, mate and a decent library can bring to the workbench of the mind.

where were we, then? concretizing reality through forgiveness and promises. can we promise to forgive? or promise to write our theses? or will uncovering the secrets of the human condition suffice? yesterday i told a friend i'd meet her at 1:00pm in the northern bit of town; two buses and 3/5 of a 13m person metropolis later, i arrived at 2:40. luckily, she forgave me - or so i can only hope. she did buy me lunch (for which i owe you my dear!). on action, ardent writes: "but trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action's constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. only from this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and starts again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new" (216).

shortly thereafter, she reminds us that 'forgiveness is the opposite of vengeance.' nonetheless, i've yet to hear someone posit that "forgiveness is the sweetest joy next to gettin' pussy," as did a certain 'poet' from the 1990's (insert 'revenge' for forgiveness; a shame we don't bare the more sensitive souls in mind.) to speak from experience - i once lived in a rank, dark and dank college-town studio on the third floor of a crumbling midwestern house, under the auspices of a turkish slumlord. what was once a 3-4 bedroom house had been converted into 12 units - three of which were in the basement and occupied by seasonal labourers from south of the rio grande (perhaps they stayed the winter - we didn't cross each others' paths all that often; how easily - and eerily - the anonymity that dominates the 'public' can creep into the private. there was a fair amount of scrubbing to be done upon arrival - for which i'm ever so grateful to family and friend who lent a hand. upon moving out, we gave the place another thorough once-over. to my great dismay, i was still docked the majority of my (parents') deposit for a specious cleaning fee. mind you, i bore a slightly more intemperate soul in those days, and was greatly tempted to take vigilante action. over the years i'd learned the 'i'll report you to the better business bureau' threat from my father - and addressed this in writing to my turkish overlord. reluctantly, if i recall correctly, she parted with $50 - though added another $25 for the space-heater she'd lent me while the furnace had been malfunctioning during exams that winter. by that point, i was thirsty for blood, if not at least spray paint. a la lutte! (if not a cathartic blog entry 4 years later - how's that for petty, postmodern bourgeois revenge).

i had her address - and constantly considered making a foray into the burbs to spray her garage door a visit. one's inner vandal is much more potent at 20 years of age, it goes without saying. (or does that precept only apply to vandals? guilty, i concur.) what message would the angel of vengeance bestow upon our beneficiary of vigilante justice? a nice "amına koyim!" in 'times new roman'? or shall we go with the classic "Bir daha anılmayacaksınız!" in the updated yale typeface?* in any case, the fateful move was never taken. after several questionable decisions one evening in april, i had an 'obstructing government operations' charge pending with the columbia, missouri police department and opted to put the operation on hold. furthermore, i was set to leave the country at the beginning of june for a month-long catholic pilgrimage with my older sister and didn't need draw any more attention to my late-adolescent errs of recent. divine intervention? i'll let my turkish slumlord be the judge of that. in any case, twas an non-act of indecision - and not one of forgiveness.

where were we going? retournons a arendt. "while violence," she writes, "can destroy power, it cannot never become a substitute for it. from this results the by no means infrequent political combination of force and powerlessness, an array of impotent forces that spend themselves, often spectacularly and vehemently but in utter futility, leaving behind neither monuments nor stories, hardly enough memory to enter into history at all" (181). to be sure, here she's referring of the perpetual violence of tyrannical government - that permanent state of terror that leaves room for neither deliberation nor action. a crude, unrefined, restrictive and puerile violence - hegel's somewhat specious asiatic despotism, if you will. but what of fanon's restitutive violence whereby the life of each settler taken in colonial algeria consequently liberated two - that of the oppressed and the oppressor? is this cathartic outburst to be understood as justice, punishment, vengeance or all of the above? vengeance, to be sure, is an act of punishment that needn't necessarily double as a deterrent; rather, in "the form of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course." furthermore, arendt maintains, it "encloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end." does vengeance exacerbate the violence of victim-hood ad infinitum by reacting - and thus recreating - the very conditions he or she would have originally sought to avoid? or does the 'original trespass' preordain a perpetual eruption of violence that, once set in motion, can be punished or forgiven but not condemned?

punishment, on the other hand, as both a principle and in distinction to mere vengeance, shares with forgiveness an attempt "to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly" (216-7). whereas human punishment goes into effect the moment it is able to exert itself (i.e. once the concomitant infrastructure is in place), the divine punishment of an all-powerful and sovereign God - at least in the christian tradition - is reserved for the end of (one's) days. only the sovereign, it would seem, can freely avenge the original trespass; as regards individual action, forgiveness is proffered as the only healthy, if less tempting, alternative thereto (according to arendt, in any case). Keep in mind she is not denying society the free prerogative to punish; she is, however, denying the individual’s capacity to act both vengefully and within a state of freedom – since the individual can only exert her freedom through the capacity to forgive the original transgression. any other response to physical violence and wrongdoing, she seems to posit, is merely re-active and thus ontologically reactionary – little more than a predictable, though not condonable, rung in the ladder of human madness. but what of he who’d like to keep climbing?

if the individual, that is, the party harmed, cannot avenge himself and remain free, wherein lies the prerogative to do so? can society ever commit an act of vengeance – or must it satisfy itself with an even-handed and dispassionate punishment of offenses? (a social phenomenon that in practice is still hard to fathom.) was carthage burned as an act of punishment, retribution or deterrence? to stress an earlier junction, arendt says that vengeance merely perpetuates a violent causal process, whereas punishment, in similar fashion to forgiveness, seeks to bring it to an end. is there a causal vacuum in which the former can functionally double in the same conclusive fashion as the latter – or is all re-action ontologically impotent insofar as it merely commits the expected? here i am not merely concerned with an eye-for-an-eye, tit-for-tat vengeance as such – but with an exploration of whether vigilante justice can retributively liberate the victim and expiate the original trespassing. if philosopher and society alike deny the victim the prerogative to freely avenge the original offense, what do they make of a third party’s attempt to do so? keep in mind that we are not talking about the state – which dispenses punishment and perhaps even justice, at times - though ostensibly never vengeance. that which is public is to remain dispassionate – a truism that betrays a rather well-known, if less documented, disdain for history and experience as such. enter, then, robbin hood; the revolutionary; the underground vigilante in all his rebellious revelry; by slaying the first offender, can the unrelated avenger expiate, if not alleviate, the violence of the original recipient’s victimhood? such are the questions i seek to address in my forthcoming thesis (for which I’ve managed precious little primary research thus far).



* Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, p.217

* Numbers 15:27 (King James): "And if any soul sin through ignorance, then he shall bring a she goat of the first year for a sin offering."

* Fuck you (anonymous); You will be remembered no more. Ezekiel 21:32