제국의 극복: 런던에서 예루살렘까지

Release from Empire: from London to Jerusalem

&nbsp;&nbsp;Romanticism cannot be understood properly without reference to modern imperialism and modern capitalism. William Blake&quot;s prophetic books of the 1790s provide an understanding them and trace out the operative process of what Blake calls the "Universal Empire."<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;In Blake&quot;s geography, London is the spatial representation of experience in the Universal Empire of modernizing capitalism. In mapping London, Blake is mapping the emerging space-time of modernization, of capital, or empire - in a word, the word-system that he would identify with "Urizen," the governing principle and ruler of the Universal Empire. The space of London, therefore, is not limited to the city of London. The spatio-temporal experience of London has spread out from the city of London, co-extensively with the ever-increasing spread of the Universal Empire, a spatial system of unequal and exploitive relations and exchanges gradually overspreading the 4 continents and 32 nations of his world.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Blake&quot;s project - and Los&quot;s - is to construct the redemptive space of a new Jerusalem out of the nightmare of the present-day "mind-forg&quot;d manacles" in the space of London. It is out of the space of London that the city of art, Golgonooza, must be built. Blake&quot;s conception of apocalyptic revolution involves the creation of another and better world, which has to be both spiritually and materially constricted out of the physicality and spatiality of London. Golgonooza, is not identified with a city of Utopia, Jerusalem, but the means toward it.