The Marriage of Heaven and Hell / Hal Foster

William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is one of the strangest and most incendiary works in the Western canon: a prophetic satire in which angels argue with devils, moral law is inverted, and the energies of rebellion are elevated above the pieties of reason. Written and engraved in the 1790s, it remains a work that resists containment-at once poem, manifesto, theology, and attack.

In this volume, the text is placed under pressure by Hal Foster, a defining critic of contemporary art and visual culture, and a central voice in the journal October. Known for his work on psychoanalysis, the avant-garde, and the afterlives of modernism, Foster brings to Blake neither reverence nor dismissal, but a sharp, testing intelligence.

His annotations move restlessly across the page: clarifying Blake's symbolic system, challenging his mysticism, tracing unexpected continuities into modern and contemporary art, and, at times, puncturing the text's prophetic authority with dry, surgical wit. The result is not a guide but a confrontation, a running argument conducted in the margins of a visionary work that has lost none of its volatility.