The Blood Libel

The Blood Libel explores the archival traces of the 1840 Damascus affair, an anti-Semitic accusation of ritual murder. We follow in detail how the death of a Catholic missionary monk in a foreign country is transformed into a racist myth that depends on the figure of the savage - more precisely, on the paranoid projection of the Jew as a masked inner enemy, who, as Jesi writes, has hypocritically and externally civilized himself - and who has thus been able to continue to satisfy his blood-thirsty instincts within the very fabric of civilized societies. This study is contrasted by a profound analysis of modernitys fears articulated in the figure of the vampire in its circuits through Germanys nineteenth century. Written amidst the criminalization campaigns by the Italian state against anarchists and other inner enemies, The Blood Libel deploys Jesis conception of the mythological machine to anatomize the multiple entanglements of myth with nationalist, fascist, and right-wing culture. A heterodox and uniquely incisive form of theory production, Jesis work offers us a powerful insight into some of the deeper determinants of Western political rationality and its stigmatizing, inferiorizing, and racializing dynamics. Introduced and translated by Alberto Toscano.