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Blood: A Critique of Christianity. By Gil Anidjar. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Pp. xvii + 441. $40.00 hardcover.
Blood is a book every Christian should read. They should not, however, expect to come away in a triumphal mood; more likely they might ask: "How did we get into this bloody mess" (115)? Gil Anidjar reveals, in what seems like every citation about blood written in the last two thousand years, that blood is, in fact, everywhere. Following his books Semites: Race, Religion, Literature and The Jew, Arab: A History of the Enemy, Anidjar continues to target Western Christianity as his object of study. He approaches it by adapting Carl Schmitt's statement that the "concepts of the modern state are secularized theological concepts," replacing "secularized" with "liquidated" because he is trying to construct a political hematology (viii, 85, 121). In his previous works, he argues that secularism is an attempt by the Christian religion to retain hegemony in the so-called modern social-political world (62, and especially 246-47). In this book, he deconstructs Christianity and the omnipresence of blood in its history. In short, he attempts to trace the way Christians become a community of blood (38-39, 90).
Blood is technically not a history book even though it is filled with historical content and the scholarship to reinforce its message. But the non-linear approach Anidjar takes might frustrate the history-minded reader. In fact, it might be better to label it a battle of competing genealogies, in the spirit of philosophers like...