{"product_id":"furio-jesi-the-blood-libel","title":"Furio Jesi, The Blood Libel","description":"\u003cp\u003eIntroduced and translated by Alberto Toscano\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Blood Libel\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWritten amidst the criminalization campaigns by the Italian state against anarchists and other “inner enemies,” \u003cem\u003eThe Blood Libel\u003c\/em\u003e deploys Jesi’s conception of the “mythological machine” to anatomize the multiple entanglements of myth with the politics of exclusion and domination. A heterodox and uniquely incisive model of ideology critique, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wirklichkeit Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":58684525609295,"sku":null,"price":14.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0774\/3068\/6031\/files\/bloodlibelcs.jpg?v=1788624539","url":"https:\/\/publicknowledgebooks.com\/products\/furio-jesi-the-blood-libel","provider":"Public Knowledge","version":"1.0","type":"link"}