Photographs of human skin inscribed with tattoo-like texts, Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord series was first published in 1993, showcased in the Sunday magazine supplement of the newspaper, Suddeutsche Zeitung. Diane Elam drew attention to this work in her chapter on ‘Feminism’ in Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (2000), largely focusing on it as a linguistic performance between senders and receivers. She noted the blood used in the ink on the magazine’s cover text – blood donated from Bosnian women raped by Serbians in the Yugoslavian conflict – primarily in the context of its hypocritical reception: the German public recoiled from the impropriety of blood on the paper, not the systematic rape from which the series took leave.
Between 1999 and 2001, Derrida’s seminars focused on the Death Penalty (seminars that are only now garnering widespread attention through the Derrida Seminars Translation Project). There, blood draws material, thematic, poetic and conceptual analysis. While the cruelty of making blood flow (cruor) floods the first volume of published seminars, the ‘Ninth Session’ in the second volume begins with the question ‘How to conceive of blood?’ subsequently repeating a refrain that asks after a possible future for blood. If the ‘concept’ is the ‘end of blood’ as Derrida argues, this chapter returns to Holzer to ask how the gift of blood in Lustmord might bypass this transubstantiation. Opening a future for blood might here offer a counter-path to lex talionis, overflowing the logic of calculated and cancelled debt mandated in the masculine libidinal economy of the law.
While the mortification exhibited in the reception of Lustmord can be read as a reactive abjection that also staunches a future for blood, in this chapter it will lead to Freud’s misplaced transposition of the masculine and ‘primitive’ fear of defloration into the feminine compulsion to violently steal the penis from which she is otherwise denied. Threatening castration in order to mask her own state, Freud finds this ostensibly eternal condition repeated most strongly in the ‘emancipated’ writerly women of his own time. Yet rather than frontally refute Freud, Derrida joins in deconstructive alliance with these women in echo of resistance to the red thread of the death penalty historically offered not by philosophers or politicians but by poets and writers. In light of her ‘female libidinal economy’ as that which is both ‘endless’ and ‘difficult to read,’ ‘Sanguine Resistance’ writes the Cixous of ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ into this alliance. Moreover, where Cixous offers to ‘relieve man of his phallus’, this chapter finds a displacement of retribution in favour of another ‘erogenous field’ that, in supplanting concept, contract, and castration, might dream of a future for blood.
Key texts:
Gil Anidjar, ‘Le Cru: Derrida’s Blood’ in theory@buffalo 2015.
Hélène Cixous, ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ trans. Annette Kuhn, in Signs, 7.1 1981.
Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume 2, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2017.
Diane Elam, ‘Deconstruction and Feminism’ in Nicholas Royle, ed. Deconstructions: A
User’s Guide, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Sigmund Freud, [1917] ‘The Taboo of Virginity’ in Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,
Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, Volume XI in the Penguin Freud Library, trans.
James Strachey, Penguin Books
