Blood: A critique of Christianity

Blood: A Critique of Christianity - Gil Anidjar Blood, in Gil Anidjar's argument, maps the singular history of Christianity. 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. In Part One. The Vampire State, Anidjar analyzes the role of blood in medieval Christianity and its subsequent influence on the Western civilization- in particular how it founded and shaped the three fundamental concepts of modernity: nation, state and capital. In Part Two. Hematologies, Anidjar explores the space occupied by blood in the literary canon of the Western world, engaging with Greek culture, philosophy and psychoanalysis

What's so special about blood?

According to Anidjar, the answer to these questions is Western Christendom: "blood is the element of Christianity, its voluminous mark" (ix). Christianity's obsession with blood - which Anidjar calls "hemophilia" - extended well beyond the theological dimensions and invaded many if not all spheres and fields from law to politics to science and economy. Anidjar agrees with Carl Schmitt when he claims that "all significant concepts of history of the modern world are liquidated theological concepts". It is by Christian blood, then, that the central concepts at the heart of modernity - nation, state, capital - became available, sustainable and readable. 

"Christianity invented the community of blood. Beginning with its conception of the human as “flesh and blood,” it became the first community ever to understand and conceive of itself as a community of blood"
(38)

Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond  (2007)  by Caroline Walker Bynum examines the theology of blood and the practice of piety and of the Eucharist

Whereas in the Hebrew Bible the basis for kinship was to be found in the notion of "flesh and bones", Christianity shifted the concept of communal bond on blood. The Old Testament never uses blood as "attribute of a particular grouping or community, as a site of difference or distinction between creatures (87). The Hebrew, Greek and Latin words - nefeš, psyche, anima - indicating the spirit were translated in the Christian Bibles as blood, hence the erroneous 'blood is the life' (87).  When did the link between blood and community originate? Anidjar cites Caroline Walker Bynum as an essential contribution to the study of medieval blood as the very fabric of society, the central cult object of devotion in the Middle Ages. The sacrament of the Eucharist and the doctrine of transubstantiation - the sanguis Christi, life restoring and sin cleansing, binding together the community in a state purity - is to be seen as the matrix of differentiation, as the root of the belief that there were indeed different kinds of bloods and that the Christian blood was different from the blood of others. Christianity, then, became a biological demarker between those who did and did not possess the right blood.

Medieval concepts of blood, then, affected the relationship with Other - the infidel's blood, the blood libel, limpieza de sangre- but involved also an inner and collective revolution within the Christian community, instilling an "ideology of consanguinity" concerning kinship, genealogy and lineage (39) which lies as foundation of the modern state, a "political hematology", a "vampire state". The modern state is nothing if not the metamorphosis of the medieval body politic: the lexicon of blood in the political and legal tradition of the West (from Hobbes's Leviathan to the American 'one drop rule' and beyond). Blood also resonates in the rising of Western capitalism. The circulation of capital is equated to the biological circulation of blood: money seen as the 'life-blood' of economy, the economic machine as feeding on the blood of the workers.

"concepts such as nation and emancipation, kinship and race, law and capital, sovereign and citizen, property, inheritance, and freedom, all of these are connected by blood" (86) 

IS THERE SUCH a thing as “the Christian Question”?

Asks Gil Anidjar, obviously referring to Marx's On the Jewish Question (1844).  

The answer —so obvious, so unremarkable, and so resilient—is, of course, religion. Christianity is a religion. A religion like any other, then? Not by any means. (vii)

[10.36] "The Christianity I am interesting in is the one that has historically been called Western Christendom: the Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation in its effective history. I suppose the founding date to ask the question is 1492 which is both the final stage of ethnic cleansing in Western Europe - both with regard to Jews and, for the most part, Muslims. It's also, of course, the conquest of America, which is where Christianity gives itself the absolute right, basically, to take over the world. And, ultimately, it almost succeeds".

As a matter of fact, the year 1492 is rich in historical implications: three major key happenings occurred within a very short time. First, the fall of the emirate of Granada by the hand of the Christian monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabel ended almost eight centuries of Islamic rule. Then, the Jews of Spain who had not converted to Catholicism were expelled in mass from the Iberic peninsula. Lastly, Christopher Columbus sailed in the service of the Crown of Castille on his first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean "1492 was a disaster not only for the Caribbean and the Americas but for Europe itself, because it enforced a notion of the emergent modern nation-state as ideally unified in ethnicity, religion, culture and mores. Such a notion became an assumption, and frequently led to the further notion that the nation-state should be based on ethnic superiority, separateness, and contempt or hatred for other nation-states" John Docker

John Docker's 1492  The Poetics of Diaspora takes as a premise the 'lost world' of a shared Indian, Arab and Jewish culture which was destroyed in the early modern period by the expansion of Europe. Inspired by various literary works, amongst which Salman Rushdie's The Moor Last Sigh.

Ella Shoat, an Iraqi-Israeli-American cultural critic, underlines the connections between the Spanish Reconquista and the Conquista of America: it was only after the triumph over the Muslims that the reign of Castille invested in Columbus' plans; and it was the wealth confiscated from the Jews expelled that financed his voyages. The policies of forced conversions and killings of Muslims and Jews in Christian territories enforced by the Spanish Inquisition can been seen as "an early exercise in European self-purification" (Shoat, 25), an anticipation of the conquista practices across the Atlantic where the indigenous only gained protection from massacres after converting to Christianity.

[Rethinking Jews and Muslims: Quincentennial Reflections]

Going back to Anidjar then, Blood gives a fundamental contribution to our understanding of difference: the origin of modern notions of difference are to be found in theology and not in the secular traditions Europe insists to promote as true foundations of its history. The idea that the European continent emerged as dominant because of modern and secular processes - scientific progress, technological innovations, the birth of capitalism and later industrialization - does not sufficiently explain its hegemonic status. Nor does secularism account for Europe's desire to cut off all that was Europe from all that was non-Europe. In order to exist and to grow, spreading across the world, Europe needed to institute itself as uniquely fundamentally and intrinsically different from all non-Europe: this element of difference is identifiable in Christianity and in Christian blood. 

   Blood is the central means through which distinctions between "Enlightened therefore peaceful" Europe and "savage therefore at war" non-Europe are constructed. "Bloody", "bloodiness", "bloodthirsty", "bloodshed" are aligned with the fear of the barbarians at the gate, whereas Europe is equated with peace and tolerance. Yet, Europe's very history is one of blood: a trajectory of wars, conquests and dispossession of the Other. It is for Christianity that blood assumes such crucial importance. Still, Western civilization insists in thinking about Judaism and Islam as the bloodthirsty religions. Because blood is arbitrary and ultimately meaningless in and of itself - blood types do not account for kinship - Blood forces to reflect on how difference is created, and to remember that differences are always arbitrarily demarcated.

Martina Cincotto