Join us for the launch of The Blood Libel by Furio Jesi (Wirklichkeit Books 2026), introduced and translated into English for the first time by Alberto Toscano. Alberto Toscano will be in conversation with Esther Leslie.

The Blood Libel, written in 1973 by the Italian scholar of myth and radical critic Furio Jesi, explores the archival traces of the 1840 Damascus affair, an anti-Semitic accusation of ritual murder. We follow in detail how the death of a Catholic missionary monk in Ottoman Syria is transformed into a racist myth that depends on the figure of the "savage"—more precisely, on the paranoid projection of the Jew as a "masked inner enemy," who, as Jesi writes, "has hypocritically and externally civilised himself—and who has thus been able to continue to satisfy his blood-thirsty instincts within the very fabric of 'civilised' societies." This study is contrasted by a profound analysis of modernity's fears as projected onto the figure of the vampire in its circuits through Germany's nineteenth century.

Written amidst the criminalisation campaigns by the Italian state against anarchists and other "inner enemies," The Blood Libel deploys Jesi's conception of the "mythological machine" to anatomise the multiple entanglements of myth with the politics of exclusion and domination. A heterodox and uniquely incisive model of ideology critique, Jesi's work offers us a powerful insight into some of the deeper determinants of Western political rationality and its stigmatising, inferiorizing, and racialising dynamics.

Furio Jesi (1941–80) was an Egyptologist, historian of religions, literary critic, and pioneering thinker of the role of myth in literature, politics, and culture. He is the author of Secret Germany: Myth in Twentieth-Century German Culture (1967; English 2023), Time and Festivity (2021), Spartakus: The Symbology of a Revolt (2000; English, 2014), and Cultura di destra (Right Wing Culture; 1979).

Alberto Toscano is the author of Communism in Philosophy (2025), Late Fascism (2023), Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (2023), and Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (2010; 2017, 2nd ed.), among other books, and the translator of books by Furio Jesi, Franco Fortini, Toni Negri, and Gianni Carchia.

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies of Walter Benjamin, and most recently The Rise and Fall of Imperial Chemical Industries: Synthetics, Sensism and the Environment (2023). A study of anti-fascist radio pioneer Ernst Schoen (written with Sam Dolbear) appeared in 2023: Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the Twentieth Century.