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 German 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 – blood donated from Bosnian women raped by Serbians in the Bosnian War – primarily in the context of its hypocritical reception: the 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. There, blood drew material, thematic, poetic and conceptual analysis. While the cruelty of making blood flow (cruor) flooded 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. 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 onto the feminine compulsion to castrate and to steal the penis that she is otherwise denied. 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 invocation for women to write themselves, ‘Sanguine Resistance’ reads the Cixous of ‘Castration or Decapitation?’ within 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.