What does Romanticism have to do with communism, enclosure, and the commons today? In this episode we speak with Joseph Albernaz, author of Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community, about the radical lineage running from Blake and Hölderlin to Marx and Bataille. We explore how Romantic literature conceived “groundless community”—a poetic and ecological alternative to enclosure and collective identity—and how those ideas reverberate through scene-shaping thinkers like Bataille, Derrida, Nancy, and Moten. Along the way we trace the Commons not as a nostalgic relic but as an ethics of excess and openness that surges beneath modern property and identity structures.

Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community: https://www.sup.org/books/literary-studies-and-literature/common-measures

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The Inoperative Community

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