Anger is Opposite to Revenge

July 25, 2025

Anger is often portrayed in accompaniment with revenge. In fact, most of the symbols of anger—fire, the fist, or the veins on one’s head—double as symbols of revenge. However, there are differences between the two that, however subtle, put them opposite to one another.

Anger has a very specific meaning in psychoanalysis. Anger, if distinguished from a desire to revenge, is an affect. From this perspective, there is no such thing as unexpressed anger. In fact, there is no such thing as accurately expressed anger, either. An affect is part of the Real; it slips through the cracks of language but hits you like a brick wall after you charge full-speed at an object of desire on the other side.

Revenge lies on the finish line of the desire to revenge. The desire, like all desires, is a self-defeating one. Revenge can be done; once a revenge is successful, there is no point for the exact same kind of revenge to be repeated anymore, much like the desire to watch a show for the first time. Revenge does not slip through language; it only has meaning through the means of language.

These statements can seem kind of hand-wavey and mostly speculative, so it will be helpful to discuss a few examples.

Revenge incites; anger corners.

Anger, when it first manifests, might not look like anger. It might feel like despair, sadness, or even anxiety (in the modern sense; not psychoanalytically). It can look like something you can overcome by practicing anger management or vent it out in a rage room, but it demands confrontation and direct acknowledgment by cornering someone into a position where they are forced to do so.

In the Iliad, anger is portrayed as somatic and visceral: “[Agamemnon’s] heart was black with rage, and his eyes flashed fire…” Almost as if on their own, cornered by the language and unwavering rule of the gods and goddesses, his heart and eyes are moved by this affect before he himself realizes it. Somatic clues are often interpreted as preceding or causing psychic ones; even if the intelligent self tries to repress, anger corners the repressed parts of one’s consciousness into admitting its existence with the body as a starting point.

No one understands revenge; anger understands no one.

Revenge often amplifies itself it a process of inflating the object of desire each time it is finished. Towards the end of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus embarks on an epic and frustratingly drawn-out revenge (among other things such as indulgence, strategy, and fear), he kills all the suiters of his wife, therefore starting a terrifyingly massive war between the inflated subject—his forces and followers—and an inflated object—countless families’ revenge of the dead suiters.

The ending of the Odyssey is as frustrating as it is inevitable. The revenge is amplified to a divine feud, but it is resolved without much elaboration. It shows that nobody understands revenge, or knows how to resolve amplified revenge, not even the divine powers. Anger, however, is the brick wall—it hits everyone without discrimination, as if it understands none of the efforts to repress it, not even the fantasy of not acknowledging it at all.

Revenge lingers; anger moves.

In Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, Nie Xiaoqian lingers in the world of the living, her existence dependent on her desire to revenge her wrongful death at 18 years old. She plans an elaborate ploy; not forcing, but tempting the victim, Ning Caichen, towards her trap to take his soul. Revenge lies in strategic planning, towards a narrative of fairness where others suffer just like what the subject experienced. Revenge stories are possibly most powerful because the desire lingers in the characters and in us, the readers, aligning us with their fictional rage.

How does Nie Xiaoqian resolve this desire? Perhaps disappointingly for us, she subverts her desire into experiencing a life after 18 years old that she thinks she should have lived, marrying Ning Caichen after his wife died, fulfilling domestic duties, and ultimately having a child with Caichen. Readers familiar with the story will recognize that Ning Caichen is portrayed as a perfect subject (which arguably becomes an object, perhaps all-consuming object) who resists temptations and only desires within the traditional Chinese cultural framework. He is unmoved by anger just as how Nie Xiaoqian is moved by hate; he is a most passive traditional subject just as how Nie Xiaoqian is a most passionate traditional object.

We have seen how anger and revenge coexist but lie on opposite ends. Like how Buck Mulligan experiences the unignorable pulses of blood and heat on his face, anger, as an affect in the Real, reminds us of what it means to be a subject who desires. Anger can prompt revenge or be interpreted through revenge, but their two forces pull on the opposite ends of the rope.

“—O, an impossible person! he exclaimed.”

Simply a naive denouncement or not, the impossibility of aligning a directional revenge with an aimless anger makes us persons. Possible persons who fight, yet hopelessly and unwillingly coexist with the impossibilities of being.

This is a short-short article in a series of short-short opinion pieces. Ideas are of my own except when they are not.