Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 27–48, 2004 The blood compact: international law and the state of exception in the 1896 Filipino revolution and the US takeover of the Philippines 1 JOHN D BLANCO [W]e shall ask ourselves … whether, in fine, it would not be better to have no civil society than to have several. … Is it not this partial and incomplete association which is the cause of tyranny and war? And are not tyranny and war the two worst scourges of mankind? Jean-Jacques Rousseau, E ´ mile In 1885, the Spanish colonial government in the Philippines commissioned artist Juan Luna (who resided in Paris at the time) to portray what many considered to be a foundational event in the ‘bloodless’ pacification of the archipelago during the sixteenth century. Paradoxically, albeit perhaps not surprisingly, the event demanded the sacrifice of blood. I speak of the blood compact, Sandugan (literally ‘united in blood’) or pacto de sangre, which later figured prominently in the discourse of the Philippine-born elite intellectuals of Europe; and later, too, amongst the revolutionaries of Andre ´s Bonifacio’s revolutionary brother- hood or Katipunan in the 1890s. This essay focuses on a series of interpretations advanced by Spanish, Filipino and US leaders at the turn of the century, which illustrate how the blood compact came to precipitate and perpetuate the very conditions of imperialist war, revolutionary violence, and the state of exception, that it was designed to prevent. Chroniclers record the participation of sixteenth-century conquistador leaders Ferdinand Magellan and Miguel Lo ´pez de Legazpi in the native Sandugan, throughout the military campaign to pacify the islands for Spanish occupation and religious evangelisation. It consisted in the following procedure: a represen- tative or leader of each opposing party would cut his right arm and let some blood flow into a container filled with wine. After blood and wine were mixed together, each leader drank from the cup of the other. Yet what did the modern re-emergence of this emblem to the public eye in the period of late Spanish colonial sovereignty, colonial reform, and eventually bloody revolution, sig- nify—and what did it obscure? It cannot have been a coincidence, for example, that Spain would have Luna portray the blood compact as a symbol of legitimate Spanish sovereignty in the archipelago, the very same year as the formalisation ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/04/010027–22  2004 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies DOI: 10.1080/1368879042000210603