Being at the Limit : William Blake, Aesthetic Sensation, and Ontological Difference

Being at the Limit is a study of the potential for revolutionary change and the aesthetic conditions that make ontological transformation possible.

Through an engagement with William Blake’s nineteenth-century poetry, prose, and visual art, English professor David M. Baulch poses questions that were urgent in the Romantic period and remain urgent today: How does difference come into the world? How can revolution avoid recreating the very structures of domination it seeks to overturn? Haunted by the failures of the French Revolution, Blake developed an aesthetic practice oriented towards ontological change, which is the emergence of what is truly new rather than the repetition of the old in altered form. Baulch traces the development of this revolutionary aesthetic through Blake’s post-1800 marginalia, letters, and exhibition catalogues, reading them as evolutionary steps toward the books Milton and Jerusalem.

Challenging critical accounts that emphasize Blake’s retreat from revolutionary politics into idiosyncratic mythology or Christian apocalypse, Baulch argues that Milton and Jerusalem represent an intensification of Blake’s revolutionary commitments.