terry eagleton on william blake

figured i'd mix it up a bit with a non-youtube post...

noodling around on the internet today, i stumbled upon a great essay by terry eagleton about the politics of william blake. i don't know enough about eagleton to bring much baggage to the article, so if he's someone that peeves you, i apologize.

anyway, it's a refreshingly positive account of how political liberties are also spiritual, creative and sexual. i've been really preoccupied the idea of pleasure lately-- it's rare that i see it addressed as something neither utopian nor reactionary. this piece kinda does the trick. click on the excerpt below for the full article:

Politics today is largely a question of management and administration. Blake, by contrast, viewed the political as inseparable from art, ethics, sexuality and the imagination. It was about the emancipation of desire, not its manipulation. Desire for him was an infinite delight, and his whole project was to rescue it from the repressive regime of priests and kings. His sense of how sexuality can turn pathological through repression is strikingly close to Freud's. To see the body as it really is, free from illusion and ideology, is to see that its roots run down to eternity.

p.s. this website is awesome.