Apocalyptic Visions, Heroism, and Intersections of the Human and ‘the Not Human’ in Blake’s Milton

Abstract

Blake’s apocalyptic Illuminated Book Milton depicts nonhuman entities converging with the human at key moments, a convergence that evokes Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of becoming-animal, the rhizome, deterritorialisation, as well as lines of flight, and valorises border crossings and the in-between. These intersections occur in the becomings of humans and nonhumans when engaged in self-annihilation and inspiration (the repeated main actions of the poem), and affirm communal heroic acts. With its socio-political and ecological undertones, Blake’s alternative vision of apocalypse, which only ever remains a vision, provides a reconceptualisation of heroism, producing an epic in which fundamental change relies on a multiplicity of subjectivities, never to be got at but always poised in multiple lines of flight, thus keeping limitless potentialities in play indefinitely.