Overview

Roberto Esposito's poetic and historically layered new book draws on a famous, and famously opaque, passage from the Old Testament to shed light on the vision of self and domination that has profoundly shaped western identity and left its mark on western culture. These ten lines from Genesis tell the tale of Jacob wrestling with a mysterious adversary on a riverbank. But who exactly is Jacob wrestling with – the divine? Evil personified? Absolute otherness? Or his deepest, most subconscious self, repressed and projected? Who, in other words, is the adversary, and what is the enigmatic conflict that binds the two in perpetual conflict? Interchangeable and yet never resolved, these entwined adversaries speak to our great desire to come face to face with personal truth, even if only for an instant, while coming to terms with its impermanence. Casting a wide net, Esposito connects his reading of Jacob and the Angel to the fundamental relationship between self and adversary inherited by the modern West and explores the extraordinary influence this story has had on western culture, from philosophy and theology to literature, politics and art.

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9781509567805

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Reviews

""In this, his most personal and unsettling work, Esposito asks us a question that haunts the contemporary moment. What is my relation to my adversary? What do I owe them and they me? Beginning with the enigmatic encounter between Jacob and the adversary at the Jabbok river, and then across an astounding number of literary, artistic and cultural interpretations, Esposito theorizes a productive relation between adversaries to warn us against thinking that our struggle with the enemy, god, angel ‒ whatever or whoever is other ‒ can ever end in either’s complete victory. We are the Adversary and the Adversary is us. Our contemporary failure to understand this results in the same barren end: the destruction of both self and other."" Timothy Campbell, Cornell University ""Esposito reads Jacob’s mysterious struggle as a primal scene of politics, theology and selfhood, where conflict and blessing are inseparably entangled. This daring meditation unsettles easy distinctions and compels us to rethink the adversary as a structural feature of communal, historical and even psychic life."" Devin Singh, Dartmouth College

Author Information

Robert Esposito is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy. Zakiya Hanafi is an independent scholar and translator in Seattle, Washington.

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