Blake and the Queering of Jouissance

Abstract

On the face of it, Blake is so queer that it is simply astonishing that it has taken so long to produce a collection of essays on queer Blake. Although Blake’s poetry lends itself to deconstructive analysis, and although queer theory is often indebted to de construction, his poetry is perhaps more resistant to certain forms of queer theory than we might expect. This chapter, therefore, examines the unexpected pressures Blake may be said to put upon queer theory. It does so by considering how Blake resists certain concepts in queer theory because he does not embrace the necessary dis- ruptiveness of jouissance, meaning enjoyment; rather, he insists upon the consequences of desire when he suspends reproduction yet demands that jouissance lead to self-annihilation.¹ Building upon Jonathan Dollimore’s (2001) sense of queer theory as a form of wishful theory because desire is framed as disruptive, but rarely disrupts the critic, I argue that Blake insinuates a gap between jouissance and self-annihilation, and therefore, desire cannot be inherently radical or subversive if it contains desire back in forms of identity like gender or essentializes desire as disruption. By making jouissance not the end, but the means to self-annihilation, and by not granting jouissance the automatic power to shatter the self, even when that self embodies heteronormativity, Blake frames jouissance as a precondition for change, but one that does not in and of itself achieve meaningful change.²