Organizing the passions: Minds, bodies, machines, and the sexes in Blake and Swedenborg

Abstract

This paper compares Emanuel Swedenborg's account of how bodies ought to be organized with the radical revision of his thought developed by William Blake. As I will suggest, the debate between these figures is not exhausted by the contest between reason and imagination; it is also about "hard" and "soft" systems, which organ-ize bodies, passions, and arguably the imagination itself in ways radically different from each other. These differences are nowhere more evident than in the sexual politics they imply and in the radically different roles they reserve for creation and "emergence." My argument begins with Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, the at-first-sight unlikely points of departure for Bla..