To Sabotage the Mythological Machine

This November, Wirklichkeit Books is publishing the first-ever English translation of Furio Jesi’s 1973 essay The Blood Libel. The Trial against the Jews of Damascus; Metamorphosis of the Vampire in Germany. The text is introduced and translated from Italian by Alberto Toscano, and some readers might be familiar with Jesi’s work on myth and right-wing culture through Toscano’s 2023 book Late Fascism. During his short and intense period of intellectual production, Jesi developed a heterodox and uniquely incisive model of ideology critique, and Toscano’s reading of it, elaborated in this short interview and in the lengthy introduction to The Blood Libel, uncovers its valence for contemporary discussions of anti-Semitism and racism. The Blood Libel is the first title in the Wirklichkeit Books Translation Series and can be preordered here.

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Wirklichkeit Books (WB): Who was Furio Jesi?

Alberto Toscano (AT): Uncategorizable and polymathic, Furio Jesi—born in 1941 and died in 1980—is primarily known as an extremely original scholar of myth and German literature, but that is hardly exhaustive. Having dropped out of high school to undertake studies in Egyptology, archaeology, and antiquity, Jesi published his first books—on Roman legends and Egyptian pottery—as well as several scholarly articles in his teens. Author of both a children’s fantasy book and a vampire novel, he was also a poet and a communist trade unionist. His interlocutors ranged from the architecture critic Sigfried Giedion to the mythologist Karl Kerényi, from the historian of religions Georges Dumézil to the novelist Italo Calvino.

WB: Your translation of Furio Jesi’s 1973 essay The Blood Libel is published in November by Wirklichkeit Books. What was the political, cultural, and discursive context in which Jesi wrote The Blood Libel?

AT: Perhaps even more so than in other Western European countries, the late 1960s and early 1970s in Italy were a time of intense political reinvention, insurgency, conflict, and repression. They were a “red decade” but also “years of lead” marked by a “strategy of tension” which saw the deep state and far-right actors contribute to a situation that some recognized as one of creeping civil war. It was a context marked by a combative workers’ militancy in the factories, culminating in the “Hot Autumn” of 1969. It was a period marked by a burgeoning and transformative feminist movement and incredible cultural ferment, but also of police killings of anarchists and demonstrators, neo-fascist bombings, and the beginnings of a turn to armed struggle by sectors of the far left. This period also witnessed complex tensions and fractures among Italian Jewish leftists surge in response to the 1967 Arab–Israeli War (or Six-Day War) and continue thereafter. Jesi, like Franco Fortini, stood out as an early critic of Zionism and imperialism.

WB: You’ve been using Jesi’s work as a source to theorize today’s right-wing culture—to employ a Jesian term—especially with regard to the role of myth in nationalist and fascist ideologies. What makes Jesi’s work so relevant for your own thinking, and what makes it a useful tool for an analysis of our present more generally?

AT: I believe that Jesi provides us with some vital conceptual tools for dissecting those aspects of contemporary right-wing culture that mobilize mythical, religious, or esoteric languages, aesthetics, and attitudes. Writing when neo-fascists were recovering the likes of Oswald Spengler, Mircea Eliade, or Julius Evola (as some are again today), he was profoundly, philologically sensitive to the origins and characteristic gestures of this culture, but also irreverently and combatively drawn to puncturing the vacuity, bad taste, and thoughtlessness behind contemporary cults of sacrifice and heroism, of Blood, Honor, and Tradition. His reflections on “ideas without words” ring with a terrible contemporaneity as we behold the kitsch spectacle of unlettered civilizational triumphalism in US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s blathering about thymos at the Pnyx. Jesi’s dissection of the right’s religio mortis is a critical prism through which to approach the anachronistic celebrations of lethal virility that constellate our present.

WB: What does Jesi mean when he speaks of the “mythological machine,” and what is the technicization of myth?

AT: By speaking of the “mythological machine,” Jesi was seeking to move away from and against a mythical approach to myth that is shared by many mythologists who treat myth as an atemporal essence, a numen, something sacral or auratic. For Jesi, the epistemological and political imperative is to study the devices producing myths and their historical functioning without treating myth as the bearer of mystery, secrecy, or authenticity. By thinking of the production of “mythological materials” through the “image” of a machine, Jesi hoped to liberate the mythologist from the damaging piety that treats myth as some kind of transhistorical substance to which we could esoterically accede, and to orient us instead toward an intellectual praxis that explores how to deactivate, even to sabotage that machine. But the machine cannot be accessed or “unplugged” directly. A patient detour through the material and textual data that “circumscribe and render particularly significant the output of the mythological machine” is necessary, according to Jesi. Hence Jesi’s attention both to sociohistorical contexts and to mythological paratexts, namely, the disappearance, fabrication, and circulation of books that can become myths unto themselves, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The upshot of this meticulous attention to the historical materiality of mythological products, in this instance, is to trouble and interrupt the notion of a seamless continuity in the genealogy of anti-Semitism: while Nazism may be understood as a concerted effort to monopolize and capitalize upon the operations of the mythological machine, its instrumentalization in a genocidal key of the accusation of ritual murder enacts a different racist logic than the Catholic anti-Semitism driving the Damascus affair, while the vampiric mythology coursing through German letters is of little moment for the Nazis’ own “manipulation of blood.”

WB: The Blood Libel is a constellation of two essays: The Trial against the Jews of Damascus is followed by Metamorphosis of the Vampire in Germany. How do the two elements relate to each other? Does Jesi make a connection between the case of the blood libel in Damascus and the vampire in German literature?

AT: The connections or resonances are certainly there, but they are not deductive or direct. The accusation of “ritual vampirism” is one of the elements of the Christian and anti-Semitic blood libel. But as Jesi shows, it takes a subsidiary role to the “negative reversal of Christ’s sacrifice” and the theme of infanticide. As I try to elaborate in my introduction to the book, I think that the deeper connection is to be sought in Jesi’s efforts to think through the politics and epistemology of the persecution of otherness and difference—in other words, to map and dismantle the mythological machine of racism.

WB: What are the formal strategies Jesi mobilizes to develop his ideology critique?

AT: In The Blood Libel and elsewhere, Jesi—clearly informed and inspired by Walter Benjamin’s model of the constellation—operates through what he termed a “method of composition” that seeks to intervene in the mythological machine not through a form of systemic or structural critique but via an archival, philological, and citational practice that Jesi likened to musical composition. Jesi himself suggested that it was in the architecture and movement of his thinking rather than in any communicated content or thesis that its critical epiphanies were to be sought. In The Blood Libel, this method is evident in the montage of the archival materials relating to the 1840 Damascus affair but also in the sudden illuminations generated by citations of Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power or the Marquis de Sade’s thoughts on cannibalism. At a moment when even oppositional criticism too often succumbs to the logic of an intellectual marketplace that prizes streamlined storytelling, bullet-pointed content, and the dispensation of advice, Jesi’s style of thought, which combines political intransigence with the refusal of stereotypy and simplification, is a salutary antidote. Sometimes, to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation of Leibniz, we are better served by distinct and obscure ideas than by clear and confused perceptions.

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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.

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).