A heterodox and uniquely incisive model of ideology critique, Furio Jesi's work offers us a powerful insight into some of the deeper determinants of Western political rationality and its stigmatizing, inferiorizing, and racializing dynamics.
The Blood Libel, written in 1973 by the Italian scholar of myth and radical critic Furio Jesi, 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 Ottoman Syria 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 modernity's fears articulated in the figure of the vampire that circulated through Germany's nineteenth century.
Written amidst the criminalization campaigns by the Italian state against anarchists and other "inner enemies," The Blood Libel deploys Jesi's conception of the "mythological machine" to anatomize the multiple entanglements of myth with the politics of exclusion and domination.
The Wirklichkeit Books Translation Series introduces texts by iconoclasts of the twentieth century to an Anglophone audience. The Blood Libel marks its first title.
Alberto Toscano teaches at the School of Communications, Simon Fraser University, and codirects the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Late Fascism (2023), Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (2023), and Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), among other books.
Furio Jesi (1941–1980) was an Italian writer, translator, mythologist, and Germanist. A correspondent of Thomas Mann and Károly Kerényi, he worked on a number of studies of Egyptian and classical mythology, and pioneering thinker of the role of myth in literature, politics, and culture. He is the author of Secret Germany: Myth in Twentieth-Century German Culture (1967; English 2023), Time and Festivity (2021), Spartakus: The Symbology of a Revolt (2000; English, 2014), and Cultura di destra (Right Wing Culture; 1979).
