The Faces of the Adversary

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 the deepest, most subcon…