Consider Samuel Sewall who, in 1700, understood the presence of Africans on the continent as constituting “in our Body Politick . . . a kind of extravasat Blood.” Or John Adams, again, who, commenting on the British constitution, wrote that “a political constitution is like ‘the constitution of the human body’; ‘certain contextures of the nerves, fibres, and muscles, or certain qualities of the blood and juices’ some of which ‘may properly be called stamina vitae, or essentials and fundamentals of the constitution; parts without which life itself cannot be preserved a moment.’” James Madison, for his part, reminded his listeners of “the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defense of their sacred rights, consecrate their union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies.” There were a couple of relevant Roosevelts, and then there was Ronald Reagan, who buttressed a widespread regime of “hemophobia,” as Michael Davidson calls it. And after September 11, Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell tell us, “the excessive desire to give blood was perhaps driven by a sense that the body politic was itself wounded in the attacks.” Barack Obama made clear, in his inaugural address, that he continues to hold up the bloody torch: “Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man—a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake.”
I submit therefore the following formulation toward an understanding of the American spirit, of American spirituality through its generations.
Blood is spirit. Blood is the American spirit.
This statement could easily have been misunderstood as a contrived reduction of American history, of American religion. Does it not seem to summon race first and foremost, one of America’s more embarrassing, yet ephemeral and marginal, facets? One might retort with some reason that race is hardly so negligible, or obsolete, yet that case would be misguided, or at the very least difficult to advance, by having recourse to an argument on the spirituality of race in America. But what if race was derivative instead, a moment or component in a larger spiritual movement? What if that movement and its history were carried by blood, by a Great Awakening, and quickening of blood? What if blood defined a more expansive history of America, of spirituality in America? What if America was possessed by blood?
But blood is a metaphor, is it not? It cannot—more precisely, it should not—be read literally in most of the instances I have recalled. The domains of its operations are not to be over-interpreted, as if one could find bits of flesh and drops of blood in the law or in the economy. Besides, blood is a universal! I have begged to differ on a number of counts here, locating these very claims, along with other moments and practices, in a larger, American hematology. I will now content myself with the following remark: the possibility of reading blood spiritually, the insistence on its metaphoricity, rather than on a literality to be exposed and interrogated—in reading the Old Testament, for instance—is precisely what the formulation I offer here seeks to make explicit. The very possibility of distinguishing between a “literal” blood and a (notably massive) series of metaphorical displacements is constitutive of our hematological condition. No blood could be extricated from the determinations America has construed, elaborated and deployed. To the extent that blood continues to be seen as a metaphor that would have been (wrongly) literalized in race discourse and practice, to the extent that blood continues to be unreflectively seen as if it were distinctly spiritual or physiological, it maintains its covert hold on us. In the United States of America, at any rate, all blood is spirit, and all spirit is blood. Literally.
QED.
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