“Like a pillar of fire above the Alps”: William Blake and the Prospect of Revolution
The Alps are not part of a sublime prospect in William Blake's poetry simply because they provoke Burkean terror or occasion a Kantian sensation of the unrepresentable. Rather, in both The Song of Los (1795) and Jerusalem (1804–c. 1820), the Alps are sublime in so far as they present the prospect of revolution. The earlier poem flirts simultaneously with a vision of revolution as eschatological finality and as the political realization of the ideas of “Rousseau and Voltaire.” By contrast, Jerusalem conveys revolution as an experience that potentiates the emergence of a radical ontological condition that frees the subject from both political and religious subjectivation. This paper traces the ways Jerusalem harnesses the Kantian sublime to Deleuzian concepts of difference and repetition. Jerusalem embraces the contra-finality of the sublime that Kant disparages and exploits the aesthetic as a Deleuzian site for the emergence of ontological difference. When Los sings his “watch song,” “the Alps and the Appe...