Read more
Blood, in Gil Anidjars argument, maps the singular history of Christianity. A category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining, Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. Anidjar explores the presence and the absence, the making and unmaking of blood in philosophy and medicine, law and literature, and economic and political thought, from ancient Greece to medieval Spain, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Melville. The prevalence of blood in the social, juridical, and political organization of the modern West signals that we do not live in a secular age into which religion could return. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race. It demonstrates that what we think of as modern is in fact imbued with Christianity. Christianity, Blood fiercely argues, must be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of religion alone.
List of contents
Preface: Why I Am Such a Good ChristianAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Red MythologyPart One. The Vampire State1. Nation (Jesus' Kin)2. State (The Vampire State)3. Capital (Christians and Money)Part Two. Hematologies4. Odysseus' Blood5. Bleeding and Melancholia6. Leviathan and the Blood PumpConclusion: On the Christian Question (Jesus and Monotheism )NotesIndex
About the author
Gil Anidjar is professor of religion, comparative literature, and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies at Columbia University. His books include The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy and Semites: Race, Religion, Literature.
Report
"This book is bound to become a standard against which future scholarship on the cultural history of Christianity and several related fields will be evaluated. It achieves the feat of offering an exhaustive genealogy of the significance of blood in Western civilization, thereby pulling blood into an urgently needed visibility." - Elisabeth Weber, University of California, Santa Barbara
