Modernity claims to have happily overcome revenge and replaced it with the rule of law. Since the Enlightenment, revenge has not only been seen as the antagonist of the law, but as the dark other of modernity in general. In his cultural-historical study Revenge, Fabian Bernhardt reads this hitherto hardly questioned narrative of progress against the grain. Batman appears next to Achilles, the potlatch next to 9/11, Marcel Mauss meets Immanuel Kant: In a combination of philosophical reflection, cultural anthropological access and a feel for the mass cultural imaginary, Bernhardt shows that the delegitimization of revenge has also been accompanied by a theoretical obscuration. Not only is the significance of revenge in so-called "primitive" societies regularly misjudged, but also the role that the desire for retribution continues to play incognito in modern societies. The literary scholar Saskia Fischer (University of Hanover) talks to Fabian Bernhardt about repressed energies and affects for which there seems to be no place today. Admission 12/6 €