This paper uses the trope of blood as a lens to revisit the intersection of kinship and politics. Drawing on recent research, I consider how infusing the body politic with literal and metaphorical substance provides it with an apparently unanswerable source of animation and power. Ideas about bodily substance in conjunction with everyday practices suggest some new ways of considering how political ideas acquire their emotional power and become persuasive. Suspending the analytic boundaries between the domains of kinship and politics, or family and nation, necessarily also undermines a distinction between the ‘pre-modern’ and the ‘modern’. This allows us to perceive the potential of sanguinary and other metaphors in rendering political worldviews familial and natural - as well as the inescapably political possibilities of the family.
