The plane which hit the World Trade Center tower could literally be understood as the ultimate Hitchcockian blot, the anamorphic stain which denaturalised the idyllic New York landscape

When a subject is hurt in such a devastating way that the very idea of revenge according to ius talionis is no less ridiculous than the promise of the reconciliation with the perpetrator after the perpetrator’s atonement

The first thing to do here is to assert the priority of the Jewish principle of just revenge/punishment – an ‘eye for an eye’, the ius talionis – over the standard formula of ‘we will forgive your crime, but we will not forget it’.

we are forever indebted to Christ, we cannot ever repay him for what he did for us. The Freudian name for such excessive pressure which we cannot ever remunerate is, of course, superego

a pseudo-dialectical synthesis of the two terms as a way of resolving the eternal dilemma ‘to punish or to forgive’: first, punish the perpetrator, then forgive him

It is only when she decides on her revenge that she effectively acts as and becomes one of them, losing her arrogant, superior position. In killing them, she recognises them in a Hegelian way.

For Danton, the Jacobin, revolutionary state terror was a kind of pre-emptive action whose true aim was not revenge on the enemies but to prevent the direct ‘divine’ violence of the sans-culottes, of the people themselves. In other words, let us do what the people demand of us so that they will not do it themselves…

Kierkegaard applies here the logic of hainamoration, later articulated by Lacan, which relies on the split in the beloved between the beloved person and the true object-cause of my love for him

The notion of love should be given here all its Paulinian weight

The Stalinist purges of high party echelons relied on this fundamental betrayal: the accused were effectively guilty insofar as they, as the members of the new nomenklatura, betrayed the Revolution.