Coralie Camilli Interview | Alex Gilbert #254

Coralie Camilli, substitute philosophy professor at the Military Health School (ESA) and French boxing champion, published L’art du combat (Puf) in 2020, Jours de grâce et de violence (Vérone éditions), and Insulaires (Puf) in 2023.

“Thus speaks the red judge: ‘Why did this murderer want to kill? He wanted to steal.’ But I tell you: it was blood his soul desired, not loot: he thirsted for the happiness of the knife.” (Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of the Pale Criminal, 1883)

Introduction
To address the question of revenge, let us begin with a story. A story that took place around 1830 in Corsica. At that time, there were two opposing camps, the Durazzo and the Carabelli. A man from one clan abducts a young girl from the other camp, and the shootings begin. Each retreats to their house and only goes out armed to the teeth. Once war is declared in this way, all blows are allowed, all traps, all tricks, all weapons are authorized. There are already several deaths in each clan when a woman takes the lead of the Carabelli group. She is beautiful, elegant, ruthless, and has a marvelous skill with a rifle. She sets a trap for the enemy clan when her only young son is killed in battle.

From that moment, she retreats to her house, sings songs calling for vendetta, and displays her son’s pierced shirt to remind her people of their duty to settle the blood debt. Her name was Colomba, and Mérimée, who fell madly in love with her, wrote his book Colomba, inspired by her story, though somewhat romanticized.

This story of vengeance is one among many, as numerous poetic or literary works address the subject, likely with classical theater being the first (inspired by Greek tragedies, Phaedra, Andromache, or even in a different register, Le Cid). However, the theme also encompasses disparate tales such as Melville’s Moby Dick, where the famous Captain Ahab seeks revenge on a white whale that tore off one of his legs, and Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons, which involves elaborately crafted romantic revenge plots. Additionally, cinema continuously draws inspiration from various forms of vengeance, likely warranting a dedicated conference to explore this topic. One might assume that philosophy would have thoroughly engaged with such a recurrent theme, yet aside from a few rare examples, it has largely neglected it in favor of its antonym: forgiveness.

What I aim to do is to provide a few elements to restore, or rather, to give philosophical legitimacy to the question of vengeance. Not to legitimize it outright (the question of whether one should or should not seek revenge is a moral question) but to see if philosophy can examine the issue further, and also to explore why it hasn’t done so extensively. To do this, we will start with a hypothesis: vengeance can be understood as a desire for reparation. In this sense, it carries within it a demand for justice, but one that always seems exceeded, or surpassed, or overwhelmed by the violence involved in the act of vengeance.

Firstly, vengeance is a violence that aims at reparation. Reparation for a committed crime, a suffered offense, a tarnished honor. The most typical case that seems to call for vengeance is murder, an extreme case where the reparation for a taken life can only be compensated by another life.

From these quick analyses, we can extract a few elements: vengeance is a violence aimed at reparation; secondly, this reparation can only take place if there is a form of equity; finally, this equity can become symbolic and thus legally legitimate. We can then question whether vengeance understood in this sense (an attempt at equitable reparation for a suffered offense) might not appear more just than forgiveness. The certain point is that vengeance prompts us to think, or rethink, the philosophical question of the relationship between violence and law.

The talion principle allows for a transition between the vengeful conception of redemption and the symbolic conception of redemption: by displacing the violence, it indeed repeats it, but within a difference established between the harm and its restitution.

I. Vengeance and Redemption in Biblical Texts

The roots of the Hebrew terms meaning redemption, Gaal and Padah, were originally used to denote the commercial obligation to pay off a debt. Similarly, the term yechouah, often translated as salvation, referred to liberation and deliverance from difficulties. The Torah uses the term Gaal several times, notably in Leviticus, to refer to the monetary redemption of a property sold to someone else, the redemption of a ritually impure animal, or a man reduced to slavery due to financial debt. Gaal also denotes, in the same perspective of redemption, a deceased man without children whose close relatives could redeem his name, thus ensuring the perpetuation of his name on his property. Thus, in the case of murder, the avenger or liberator was called “Goel Hadam,” the “blood redeemer,” a term derived from Gaal. The institution of the Goel Hadam is found in Numbers and Deuteronomy and designates the person who must avenge the death of his murdered close relative. The case of the cities of refuge, instituted by the Torah, (1)

How did we come to speak of redemption characterized by the cessation of violence when the “blood redeemer” still provided deliverance precisely through the practice of violence? To phrase the question differently: how do we transition from redemption resulting from vengeance to redemption understood as the cessation of violence? To understand this transition, we must mention the lex talionis, the law of retaliation, often understood as the action of reciprocating, i.e., establishing compensation between the same and the same. In reality, the only case where talion could be applied literally was, as we have seen, murder punishable by death, because the loss of life was the only case where vengeance had to be of the same nature as the crime. However, the talion allows for a transition between the vengeful conception of redemption and the spiritual conception of redemption: by displacing the violence, it indeed repeats it, but within a difference established between the harm and its restitution.

Vengeance is a violence that aims at reparation. Reparation for a committed crime, a suffered offense, a tarnished honor. The most typical case that seems to call for vengeance is murder, an extreme case where the reparation for a taken life can only be compensated by another life.

But what exactly does the rule of talion say? Let’s reread chapter XXI of Exodus, verses 22 and 27: “If men are fighting and one of them hits a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. If a man hits a male or female servant in the eye and destroys it, he must let the servant go free to compensate for the eye. And if he knocks out a tooth of a male or female servant, he must let the servant go free to compensate for the tooth.” (2) At first glance, the rule of talion seems to mean that whoever inflicts damage on another must suffer the same damage. However, the Oral Law (which comments on the written Torah) means exactly the opposite. The purpose of talion is to establish compensation between the same and the other, through a difference between the inflicted harm and its restitution, which pertains to value, not the object of the loss. It is not about replacing an eye with another eye, but compensating an eye with its value. One needs only to read passage 83b of the Talmudic tractate Baba Qama.

R. Dostai, son of Yehuda: “An eye for an eye” means monetary compensation. You say money, isn’t it the eye itself? But what would you say if one person’s eye was large and another person’s eye was small, how would you apply the principle of an eye for an eye? If you answer: in such a case we take money. Doesn’t the Torah say there will be one law for all of you? (Leviticus XXIV, 22).

Forgiveness, restoration, and financial compensation: the verse of talion cannot be applied literally because, how can one know if the loss of an eye in one person has caused the same consequences as in another? That is why the Oral Law interprets the text as an allusion to the principle of financial compensation. The Talmudic tractate Baba Qama indeed insists on the word tahat, often translated as “for” (eye for eye), whereas literally this word means “under.” The interpretation is as follows: the Hebrew letters found under the word eye (ayin) in the Hebrew alphabet mean “money” (kessef). For the loss of an eye, one will compensate with the value of that eye. It is a form of repetition: repetition of the harm suffered by the penalty inflicted on the culprit, a penalty that must match the original harm. Repetition but also difference, as the harm is indeed repeated but in another form. The compensations that must be taken into account by the one who caused the injury are of five forms, according to the Mishna of the Talmudic tractate Baba Qama:

Five obligations are incumbent upon one who injures his fellow: he must repair the physical damage, the pain, the medical expenses, the loss of work, and the moral damage (shame, humiliation).

II. Reciprocity: Spinoza and Hegel

It is noted that for vengeance to be reparative, it must involve a form of equity (including in the case of the Goel: life for life). The punishment and the crime must be equivalent in a certain reciprocity. To philosophically consider vengeance, one must first cease to see it as a sudden, blind, and irrepressible emotion. What seems indeed to characterize vengeance primarily is the rationality of the calculation it requires. It is equality, equity, or equivalence.

Spinoza, in his book, defines vengeance as follows: “Vengeance is a Desire which excites us to do evil to one who, out of a like feeling of hatred towards us, has inflicted evil upon us.” (3) By this definition, Spinoza establishes a direct link between vengeance and reciprocity: there is vengeance if, and only if, the blow we desire to strike against another is the result of equal hatred, the hatred that accompanied the harm done to us.

This first element, namely that vengeance is primarily seen, especially through the example of talion, as the implementation of an equality between the crime suffered and the punishment applied (which must be equivalent), is highlighted by Hegel in his Principles of the Philosophy of Right:

“The annulment of crime is the law of talion in that, according to its concept, it is a violation of a violation, that, according to its empirical existence, the crime has a determined qualitative and quantitative sphere and that, consequently, the negation of crime must have, in its existence, the same extent. This identity of crime and punishment, which rests on the concept, is not the equality in the specific quality of the violation but in the nature of the violation itself, that is to say, an equality according to value.” (4)

Hegel translates “law of talion” as Wiedervergeltung, while others have preferred retribution. What matters indeed is less the price the criminal must pay for his crime, than the equality or equivalence between the punishment and the crime. The value, Hegel continues, as the internal equality of things which, in their existence, are specifically quite different. In crime, the fundamental determination is the infinity of the act, the purely external character disappears even more, and equality remains the fundamental rule for determining what is essential, what the crime has deserved. Talion is the internal connection and identity of two determinations that appear as different from each other and have an external existence distinct from each other. When the criminal is subjected to the law of talion, it appears to be a foreign determination that does not belong to him; however, the punishment is only the manifestation of the crime, that is, the other half that the first necessarily presupposes. What talion has against it first and foremost is that it appears as something immoral, being vengeance, and that it can pass as a personal act. It is, however, not the personal that produces talion, but the concept of crime. “Vengeance is mine,” says God in the Bible, and to those who would see in talion only a particular, arbitrary, or subjective will, it must be said that talion is only the very form of the crime, turning against itself.” (5)

With talion, vengeful equity becomes symbolic because it aims at retributive justice. Thus, we have seen that the primary characteristic of vengeance was equity. But in the case of talion, this seems to be only representative, as it pertains to the value (of the loss) and not to the object (lost). This is what connects it not only with law (as was already the case with the Goel) but also with justice: in that it can call for symbolic reparation.

Hegel will continue, highlighting the difficulty of reconciling violence (intrinsic to vengeance) and law: “In this sphere of the immediacy of law, the annulment of crime is in its primitive form vengeance. According to its content, vengeance is just, insofar as it is the law of talion. But, according to its form, it is the action of a subjective will, which can place its infinity in any violation of its right and which, consequently, is just only in a contingent manner, just as, for others, it is only a particular will. Vengeance then becomes a new violation of law: through this contradiction, it engages in a process and continues indefinitely. Where crimes are not prosecuted and punished as crimina publica, but as crimina privata, punishment retains at least some characteristics of vengeance. Private vengeance is distinguished from that of heroes, errant knights, etc. This form of vengeance occurs at the moment of the birth of states.” (6)

Faced with this difficulty, we note that Jewish law compiled in the Talmud interprets talion not in its literal sense, but in its symbolic sense. Just as philosophical analyses, it deserves to be questioned, of course, but this proposal for reflection will have, at least, attempted to show all the issues it raises.

Notes:

(1) Parashat Behar Sinai, verses 25, 25 and following, as well as Parashat Massei, 35 verses 11 and following, similarly Parashat Shoftim, 19, verses 3 and following, and finally, Numbers, 35, verses 11, 13. These passages allowed the murderer, whether intentional or unintentional, to escape the Goel Hadam. The murderer had to remain in the cities of refuge while awaiting judgment by the Tribunal, which would then determine the nature of the crime committed: intentional or unintentional murder, intentional or negligent homicide. While the unintentional murderer had to stay in the city of refuge until the death of the High Priest, thus being punished with exile, the intentional murderer was to be put to death, preferably by the redeemer of blood. Indeed, the latter did not have the power to pardon the murderer, even if he wished to, or if the murderer requested to redeem his death sentence by any pecuniary compensation. The Goel Hadam was performing a mitzvah, a good deed, and according to Oral Tradition, any person other than a close relative could perform the task of the Goel Hadam without being punished for committing an act that was not permitted to him. A baraita from the Sanhedrin Tractate (45b) states in this sense that if there is no avenger, the Tribunal must appoint an official avenger.

(2) Exodus, verses 22 and following

(3) Spinoza, Book II of Ethics, translated by Bruno Giuliani, Almora Edition, Paris, 2017

(4) Hegel, Principles of the Philosophy of Right, Paris, Flammarion, 2021

(5) Ibidem

(6) Ibidem

Precedently:
*Penser la « messianicité sans messianisme »
*L’art de combattre un ennemi invisible
*Pandémie et production
*Après la contingence
*Hegel, Bensussan et la sortie de la philosophie
*Philosopher à Strasbourg, Jean-Luc Nancy et Gérard Bensussan, rencontres et désaccords
*De l’excès à l’excellence
*Coralie Camilli and the ‘Islander philosophy’
*L’Aliénation, du Sujet vide au Signe creux