Blood: A Critique of Christianity by Gil Anidjar (review)

The above title is a masterful, genealogical account of the function of blood in the production of Christian modernity. Beginning with the use of blood language in early Christian (particularly Pauline) sacred texts, Anidjar articulates how the community of early Christians "came to understand itself as a community of substance," a community that "invented the community of substance as the community of blood" (37–38). As blood became the chief marker for early Christian identity, blood redefined and internally refashioned the community—and the difference between communities (67). It is the distinction between bloods, beginning with Christianity, that is instructive for its use in the modern period, as, to recall Schmitt: "all significant concepts of the history of the modern world are liquidated theological concepts" (85).

What is blood's connection to the modern world? Anidjar convincingly suggests that "blood shapes and defines the channels and motions that carry the family, the class, the race, the nation, and the economy too" (89), in that modern politics and—most importantly for Anidjar—capitalism are configured on the basis of flow as systems of circulation. Christian perspectives on blood are thus the organizing principle of three central concepts of modernity: nation, state, and capital. From Hobbes's Leviathan, to Melville's Moby Dick, to Freud's Moses and Monotheism, Anidjar skillfully weaves a narrative of "hemophilia" through the traditional literature of the modern West, a narrative culminating in the provocative assumption that Christianity has successfully effused itself into the modern world in the form of capitalism, such that "Christianity qua capitalism, capitalism qua Christianity" (142). Christianity is, therefore, not a religion, but a "complex and dynamic set of disciplinary mechanisms, technologies of subjectivation, and institutional apparatuses" (247) that flows through theological, economic, legal, and political elements of modern life. The book relies on a conception of blood that is neither literal or figurative, a confusion that, says Anidjar, "I have not tried to disambiguate" (258).

Anidjar is at his masterful best when dealing with many of the canonical texts of the modern West, and perhaps less effective with texts from the ancient world. There are, at times, moments of pause for those trained in the literature of antiquity, especially in his presentation of ancient Israelite religion that "does not provide any evidence of a blood based kinship … or differentiating between collectives on the basis of blood" (46). In my opinion, this misreading of early Israelite religion unfortunately leads Anidjar to assume that early Christianity is unique in its use of blood language and its constitution of a people on the basis of blood kinship through the Eucharist. Christianity, as it "invented the community of substance as the community of blood" (38) is therefore without analogy in the ancient world, a problematic assumption that flies against many of the theoretical assumptions of prominent scholars of Christian origins, namely Jonathan Z. Smith, Russell McCutcheon, and others.

A caveat: the book is not an easy read, but rewards the hardworking reader with a sweeping analysis of the relationship between blood and Christianity and this relation-ship's influence in the modern period. The book establishes novel connections between the central texts of modernity and Christianity and is quickly becoming a standard piece in the field of political theology, with good reason. Its author does not so much answer the question of blood inasmuch as it opens up, generally, a disposition to see more clearly the way in which blood—Christian blood—has, in the "walls of its veins, and the division of its organs" (258), configured the various domains of modernity. So, if Christianity has effused itself in the modern world in the form of capitalism, what remains for it to accomplish?