Blood

A Critique of Christianity

Gil Anidjar

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231537254
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

Blood, according to Gil Anidjar, maps the singular history of Christianity. As 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.

Engaging with a variety of sources, 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.

Part One

THE VAMPIRE STATE

BLOOD IS DIVIDED into two parts, each one comprising three chapters. In this first part, three central concepts of modernity (nation, state, capital) are examined anew in terms of their rapport to blood: the community of blood, the bloodless body-politic, and the blood of economic thought. Underlying the argument are my reservations with regard to the theory of figuration that sustains much of the massive body of literature devoted to blood. We shall repeatedly see that the distribution of blood between realms and spheres, including the distinction between literal (or “real”) blood and figurative (or “symbolic”) blood, is an essential mechanism for the distribution and operations of blood in Christianity. The “political hematology” of Christianity, its hemophilia, implicates the nonpolitical dimensions of blood as well, while the specificity of blood found with increased frequency in its different spheres (economy, law, science, and so forth) does not permit the rising to primacy of any of these spheres. Blood, therefore, was never a physiologic or medical substance first, which would later have acquired symbolic dimensions. Instead, blood merges and evolves, it spreads or circulates through the three concepts here at play: nation, state, capital.

The community of blood—“Jesus’ Kin”—is predicated on the notion, erroneously presumed to be ancient and universal, that communities partake, or understand themselves to partake, of one substance. In the first chapter, I propose to reverse the temporality of that claim and argue that the sharing of blood fostered by the Eucharist gave rise to the community of blood, from which was extrapolated a universal anthropology. Accordingly, the perceived exceptionality of a community discriminating and excluding on the basis of blood (the limpieza de sangre of medieval Spain, the Nazi race laws) must be reconsidered in light of the rule, the constitution of the community of blood shared by all Christians in the Middle Ages and thereafter. Blood is accordingly at the center of the “papal revolution,” the disciplinary revolution that recasts and refigures first the body mystical as the visible body of the church’s members; second, the earthly authority of the pope (the Crusades); and third, the community of Christians as united in the pure blood of Christ. Blood is where the origin of both nation and race must be explored—at the very least. Incidentally, the striking absence of Jesus’ pure blood from scholarly theorizations of race testifies to the vanishing of Christianity from critical attention.

At the center of the community of blood, there is a political hematology as well as a hematocentric embryology, a conception of kinship based on consanguinity. In the second chapter (subtitled “The Vampire State”), I explore the historical reach of these drenched notions and conceptions along with their significance, which exceeds any recognizable “religious” dimension, while testifying to the extraordinary diffusion of blood throughout Western Christendom. I proceed toward the remarkable absence of blood, in the Middle Ages and since, from most reflections and explicit representations of the body politic. I say remarkable because of the contrast this constitutes with the spread of blood I just mentioned. Like Christianity—indeed, as Christianity in its constitutive attributes and dimensions—blood is therefore at once essential and absent, only to be found again, crucial again, in Hobbes’s Leviathan and thereafter. The friend and pupil of William Harvey, who identified the circulation of blood, Hobbes deployed the discovery of the blood pump (which preceded Boyle’s air pump, documented by Shapin and Shaffer) and sedimented the liberal political imagination with streams of blood. The place of blood in this political and legal tradition can be followed from the founding texts of modern political thought to the vicissitudes of blood in the Americas, down to the infamous “one-drop rule” and beyond.

Finally, in the third chapter (subtitled “Christians and Money”), economic thought is seen to have eagerly embraced Harvey’s re-coining of the term circulation by way of an ancient, albeit persistent and renewed, association of blood and money (deployed in a novel way by Hobbes and increasingly popularized after him, and not only by the Physiocrats). Marx was more than instrumental in linking capitalism and Christianity, finance and vampirism, money and blood, but I elaborate on a detail much less remarked upon in an otherwise foundational text, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, where Shylock is barred access to “Christian blood,” a ban that is also the means by which he is graciously stripped of his financial assets. The centrality of the concern with the purity and immunity of Christian blood here mixes with economic conceptions, where liquidity confirms the operations of capital while replicating social and political—as well as racial and theological—hierarchies.

One NATION (JESUS’ KIN)

WHAT IS THE community made of?

It is a strange enough question to ask. Yet, and stranger still, it appears to have been routinely answered. Under cover of a universalism that—from Aristotle to Maine presumably—asserts this very fact and simultaneously claims emancipation from it, the community has been held to be made of one shared substance. Some confusion may arise, no doubt, as to the meaning of the verb made in this context. For if the community (the family or the clan, the tribe or the nation, even) is in fact made of one substance, it could imply that the community is, as it were, given. In this perspective, to say that the community is made means that the community simply is, it exists as contemporaneous and coextensive with the substance of which it is always already formed and which its members a priori share. Alternatively, the verb made can imply that the community is produced, that it is made into what it is; that rather than given, its substance is the emancipatory outcome of a collective action, magical, ritualistic, or otherwise laborious—later, say, legal or contractual—that results in the common as substance (not necessarily as essence) and brings forth that substance along with, or as, itself. In Peter Fitzpatrick’s formulation, which summarizes centuries of political and anthropological thought, “the deed creates society but a society was already created so as to perform the deed.”¹ Between being and acting, the granted and the produced, the community could always be given or, indeed, made.

One might go a step further and recall, with Roberto Esposito, that the term given (and its cognates) has undergone in this precise context a transformation of sorts, a translation of its own. In earlier versions, the assertion that the community was given had not yet acquired its later meaning. Simply put, what was given did not initially refer to a common or shared substance, much less to a shared possession. As he traces the etymology of the word community to the Latin munus, Esposito explains by elaborating on an earlier meaning of the notion of “gift.”

Although produced by a benefit that was previously received, the munus indicates only the gift that one gives, not what one receives. All of the munus is projected onto the transitive act of giving. It doesn’t by any means imply the stability of a possession and even less the acquisitive dynamic of something earned, but loss, subtraction, transfer. It is a “pledge” or a “tribute” that one pays in an obligatory form. The munus is the obligation that is contracted with respect to the other and that invites a suitable release from the obligation.²

Neither made nor strictly speaking shared or common, the community is rather a site of expropriation with no prior propriety. It is a loss and a subtraction, a transfer.³ The momentous “misunderstanding” can hardly be underestimated, therefore, whereby the community comes to be conceived of as a gift or given, seeing itself as a possession in common, rather than as an obligation due. It is a misunderstanding because the community is neither property nor appropriation. To repeat: The community is neither given nor made; it expropriates. As Esposito puts it, “it is precisely the no-thing of the thing that is our common ground” (8).

Now, Esposito is quite clear that this misunderstanding constitutes a modern development. He places Hobbes at the origin of a vector that favors immunitas (and the protection and preservation of what one has and owns) over communitas. The terms are obviously linked as different relations to the munus, and the error of the (modern) ways is therefore comprehensible. But it is also, as it were, reprehensible. And so the question naturally arises: What went wrong?

“If we are to complete the categorical and semantic frame that functions as the presupposition for the communitarian genealogy under examination here,” Esposito writes, “we need to turn for a moment to the Christian conception of community” (9). It is only a brief detour, then, but it is an important one, for what Esposito describes as an early instance of the parting of ways (Esposito writes of a “double move”) has everything to do with what he will only later attribute to Hobbes and to modern politics, namely, the emphasis on property and appropriation and from there to preservation and protection. Starting from the early centuries of Christianity, as it turns out, there are already two vectors that can be distinguished within it, the first “historical-institutional” and the second “theological-philosophical” (9).

The first vector would seem to follow an itinerary of the increasing erasure of the originary ancipital character of the munus in the direction of that “appropriating” drift in meaning to which the lectio difficilior of communitas is still sacrificed. In all of the medieval lexicons, in fact, the lemma communitas is associated with the concept of “belonging,” in its contemporary subjective and objective meaning: the community is that which belongs to a collective and is that to which it belongs as its own properly essential type [genere]: communitas entis. Over time, however, the particular [localistico] character of this totality always takes on the shape of a fixed territory, as emerges in the nearness of usage between the concept of communitas and those of civitas and castrum; the latter having an obvious military inflection, signifying the defense of proper borders. (9)

The second vector remains closer to the proper understanding of the munus (which is to say that it is, strictly speaking, “im-proper” as the munus is neither owned nor proper) as that of which one partakes, from which one is expropriated. Following Paul on the body of Christ—the community of Christians—Esposito describes it as what divides and separates across “the infinite heterogeneity of substance” (10), “having nothing, yet possessing everything,” as Paul has it in 2 Corinthians 6:10. Esposito then goes on to attend to the history of translation and explains—or restores—the link between “participation” (as partaking and taking part) and the expropriating gift (munus) of the community (Gr. koinonia).

This gift-giving [donativo] inflection of “participation” restores to the Christian koinonia all of the expropriating drama of the ancient munus; what one participates in isn’t the glory of the Resurrection but the suffering and the blood of the Cross (1 Corinthians 10:16; Philemon 3:10). Any possibility of appropriation is diminished; “taking part in” means everything except “to take”; on the contrary, it means losing something, to be weakened, to share the fate of the servant, not of the master (Philemon 3:10–11). His death. The gift of life, offered in the communitarian archetype of the Last Supper. (11)

Although he describes two vectors, Esposito is, I think, clear on the restorative dimension of his own interpretation. That is perhaps why he does not attend to Christianity in its historical-institutional dimensions. More precisely, to the extent that Christianity is historical and institutional, it constitutes a vector (the first, appropriating vector Esposito described) that must be distinguished from the second, theological-philosophical vector or aspect of the same Christianity. It is this second aspect, at any rate, that Esposito restores in the passage I have just quoted, and it is on this aspect as well that he relies in order to assert the historical break performed by the moderns, by modern political thought, beginning with Hobbes. It is, to be sure, a difficult break to ascertain. Consider, for instance, that Augustine has a number of relevant things to say, some of which, Esposito writes, introduce “us into the modern, Hobbesian, perception of community” (11). There are, in other words, lines of continuity, or minimally nonlinear lines of confusion. That confusion, one with which we started concerning what the community is made of, is now revealed as having a longer history that may go back to Augustine. It does not divide history (between modern and premodern, say), but rather divides between history and theology, philosophy and institutions. One could go so far as to say that between the abstract and the concrete, the spirit and the flesh, the confusion fails to achieve a precise divide among the three distinct answers it formulates to the question: What is the community made of? It is made of being (or substance), by fiat (act or making), or of nothing (it is expropriating). As far as Esposito’s account is concerned, the only historical precedent to the misunderstanding that identifies community with the given of a proprietary substance is therefore found in the very tradition on which he relies in order to argue against it, in order to argue that communitas must be properly understood as expropriation. Somewhere along the line, a thing came of nothing. This is what went wrong. The community of Christians came to understand itself as a community of substance, as partaking of, which is to say as sharing rather than dividing, some thing.

Does it matter what that thing or substance is? As I have already suggested, the conception according to which the community is made of a shared substance, powerfully recapitulated by Freud in Totem and Taboo, is held to be ancient, found in most, if not all, collective entities around the globe and throughout history. Yet one cannot but wonder whether the detour proposed by Esposito toward a genealogy of community, a detour that takes us back to Christianity in its effective and singular history, is not deserving of a closer examination for the light it sheds on that universal conception and its spread. For the only historical precedent Esposito offers us, after all, in order to reflect on the misunderstanding of the community is what occurred in Western Christian political thought and practice. And one could easily think of a number of good reasons why this particular history is deserving of greater attention. But be that as it may, whatever is the nature of the break that translates the synchronic “double move” of Christianity (historical-institutional and theological-philosophical) into a diachronic rupture to modernity as historico-philosophical (empirico-transcendental), it is part of a “communitarian genealogy” of the Christian West. Recall that “over time … the particular character of this totality always takes on the shape of a fixed territory” and that what “emerges” there and only there, localistico, is “the nearness of usage between the concept of communitas and those of civitas ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface: Why I Am Such a Good Christian
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Red Mythology
• Part 1. The Vampire State
• Part 2. Hematologies
• Conclusion: On the Christian Question (Jesus and Monotheism)
• Notes
• Index