Acid Horizon From Blake to Bataille: Romanticism, Communism, and the Commons with Joseph Albernaz
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Aug 31, 2025 In this conversation, Joseph Albernaz, author of "Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community," delves into the intricate ties between Romanticism and contemporary political issues. He explores how figures like Blake and Hölderlin influenced ideas of communal existence and identity, offering a radical rethinking of ownership. The discussion also touches on Bataille’s views on energy and the philosophical implications of inoperativity, urging listeners to see poetry as a transformative tool for community and environmental awareness.
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Romanticism As Open, Groundless Community
- Romanticism is an open set that enables untimely, groundless ways of imagining community rather than fixed national identities.
- Joseph Albernaz reads Romanticism as fostering ungrounded commonness that resists essence-based, exclusionary communities.
Measure: Enclosure And Poetic Ambivalence
- 'Measure' names capitalist enclosure that makes incommensurable life calculable and ownable, like wage time or racial hierarchies.
- Albernaz also shows measure as poetic meter's ambivalent role that can open incommensurable commonness.
John Clare's Lived Enclosure
- John Clare grew up in Helpston and witnessed his village's enclosure at age sixteen, which haunted his poetry.
- Clare writes for an 'evergreen' language that resists ownership by capturing communal dwellings through poetic rhythm.
