Christianity: “A Manner of Dividing the Sensible”

Anidjar’s Blood can be read, with Amy Hollywood, as a political intervention designed to alienate and creatively reuse the familiar terms ‘blood’ and ‘Christianity’ to mean quite different things, namely a set of biologically, emotionally, and politically charged metaphors circulating within and fuelling a hegemonic cultural world system. While this is a clear possible reading throughout, Anidjar provides an explicit key to justify these meanings only on page 258, allowing that he has used each term as ‘catachresis’— to command our attention but also to redirect it. Contrary to Francis Landy’s wish that Andijar provide an accounting of how (actual) blood in (actual) Christian tradition relates to blood in Judaism, I suggest that Anidjar’s project requires nothing of the sort, working as it does at an entire level of abstraction above the plane of paratactically organized and comparable ‘religions’.