"Sublime labours" : Blake, Nietzsche and the notion of the sublime

Abstract

In Jerusalem Blake inscribes the philosophy of sublime into the logic of contraries, the most powerful machinery of his thought. In the frontispiece of an early version of the poem we read that the landscape of Albion is formed by two principal “rocks” of “Sublime and Pathos” which, however, are locked in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, they are seats of solidity, foundational rocks upon which things can be built (“fix’d in the Earth”, J. 1.4), but — on the other hand — they are not readily available as such, their solidity is suppressed by the “Spectrous Power” of “reason” which “covers them above”. There are, at least, two important consequences of such a positioning of sublime. First, its foundational, originary, character must be validated by its Other — in this case the pathetic; if sublime is at the beginning of things then it is a beginning already doubled and divided (it is important to mark this initial dependence of sublime on the Other, as we shall come back to this crucial relationship later on). Second, the geological placing of the two rocks implies that a considerable effort and investment of energy must be made in order to excavate them from underneath layers of soil, Le. rationalist disfigurement Thus, sublime must be penetrated into or towards, it is not readily available on the surface, and the ontological setting of the frontispiece which speaks of “a Void outside of Existence” which, in turn, “becomes a Womb” relegates this penetration both to the sphere of sexuality and a primeval territory of formative movements. We may refer to this realm as to a region of ‘onto-geology’.