Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Joseph Albernaz. Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2024. 370 pp.

Review by Sneha Chowdhury

6 March 2025

At the very outset of Joseph Albernaz’s Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community, the word “tarrying” catches the reader’s attention (p. 2). It recurs throughout the book and is used at crucial junctures to define the author’s approach to the subject at hand. While the verb is variously defined as waiting, lingering, and pausing, readers might be familiar with its philosophical resonance through G. W. F. Hegel’s well-known phrase “tarrying with the negative” from the preface to the English translation of the Phenomenology of Spirit.^[1] Hegel’s tarrying is the means through which Spirit becomes a contradictory force that negates immediate reality, namely sensed experience. To tarry with the negative is to stay with the immanent contradiction of this positive experience in order to understand that alterity or negation is not external to a subject but an integral part of its relationship to itself. In other words, tarrying is the work of dialectical reasoning. Albernaz’s tarrying departs from its Hegelian counterpart by rejecting “any master term . . . origin, telos,” or synthesis of contradictions by staying with the negative as such, that is the Abgrund, the groundless itself (p. 2). This groundlessness informs his reading of literature on figures of community in English, French, and German from the era of Romanticism, a time known for its “confrontation with the monumental crisis of community” (p. 2). Set against the backdrop of the literal groundlessness of communities brought about by legal enclosures of shared grounds in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as revolutionary experiments in building community against private property in Europe, this book traces alternative expressions of being together that exceed principles of grounded or utopian communities. It identifies measure (and its cognates, commensurability, commodity, modernity) as the exclusionary principle of enclosures that serves to deprive people of their shared ground and as a key factor in the failure of utopian projects. Effectively described as an “open field” that does not own language but simply uses it, poetry becomes the preferred genre of Albernaz’s Common Measures that in turn becomes a shorthand for poetic configurations of groundless communities (p. 9).

One of the most persuasive articulations of the book’s thesis, the chapter titled “Nonsovereign Circulations: William Blake,” offers a multifaceted analysis of Blake’s Jerusalem (1804–20) through the logic of circulation that governs the flow of power and capital, and the Sovereign who controls the center of Blake’s moral universe with the invention of sin. These define the measure of enclosure in Blake’s text according to the author. To accuse is to exclude and impose a moral hierarchy between oneself and the other (this exclusionary behavior is exemplified by Albion who accuses his family and friends, distancing himself from domestic life). However, through characters such as Los and Joseph in Blake’s retelling of Jesus’s conception, Albernaz argues that to forgive is to be predisposed to relate. Hence his pithy assertion, “forgiveness is not a relation but relation itself.” Forgiveness is not measured against sinful acts but is an ontological state of being in Jerusalem. In other words, forgiveness becomes an uneven measure of singularity—“forgiveness is how incommensurable unique singularities circulate and relate to each other, groundlessly—” (p. 167).

The opening chapter, “Singularity à deux: Rousseau,” argues that singularity is the degree zero of a groundless community. Singularity, the state of being qualitatively unique, resists any quantification, namely doubling and community, as quantification begets hierarchical relations. The author notes that the two figures of doubling in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work, the narcissistic ego and the monster, do not threaten singularity—while the former views the world as a doubled extension of itself, the latter, as an absolute other, is doubled but still a singularity unto itself. Yet, Rousseau writes about an “‘existence in common’” with a character named Mme. de Warrens, characterized by Albernaz as an ordinary relationship between two irreducible singularities independent of any grounds or necessary measures: “‘I have said, that of love; but a more essential possession which—without depending on the senses, on sex, on age, on looks—depended on everything by which one is oneself, and which one cannot lose without ceasing to be’” (pp. 74, 74–75).

In its depiction of a similar experience of groundless togetherness between William and his sister Dorothy, William Wordsworth’s poem “House at Grasmere,” the one completed book of The Recluse (1888), is the theme of the book’s second chapter, “Homeward Unbound: The Wordsworths.” Through a close analysis of a classic Romantic form—the fragment—the author reads the poem as a catachresis of wholeness or totality. The Wordsworths’ domesticity is inclusive of its human and nonhuman neighbors, it eludes any sense of wholeness, it lies at the periphery of the totalizing aims of The Recluse (to build a community removed from the confines of the domestic in the wake of the failed Revolution), and it resists the scalar valence of the Anthropocene.

Along with Dorothy Wordsworth’s companion poem “Grasmere – A Fragment,” Common Measures reads poets overshadowed by other Romantics during their lifetime: English peasant poet John Clare, Afro-British poet Robert Wedderburn, and German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, whose echoes reverberate throughout the book. Albernaz deftly moves between close analysis of poetry’s immanent potentiality to rupture regimes of measure and enclosures; the effects of industrialization on communities and the inner workings of political economy; and twentieth-century French debate on community via Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Nancy. This complex scholarly maneuver can be challenging to those arriving at the book’s material for the first time but a treat to those already attuned to its measures.

^[1] “Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it,” (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller [New York, 1977], p. 19).