The "perpetual exercise of an interminable quest": the Biographia Literaria and the Kantian revolution.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-DEC-04

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University

1. Mr. Flosky, Mr. Coleridge, Professor Kant, and Jacques Lacan

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK'S SEND UP OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE IN Nightmare Abbey says more than its apparently reductive satire at first suggests. Through Nightmare Abbey's character Mr. Flosky, Peacock's novel links Coleridge's political apostasy, philosophically abstruse prevarications, and argumentative lacunae with "Kantian metaphysics." (1) The singularity of Peacock's satire is that it is not content to simply present Mr. Flosky as a long-winded fool who has merely substituted his own self-justifying mystifications for a deep scholarly understanding of Kantian thought. Rather, Mr. Flosky's interest in Kant, regardless of its accuracy, serves as a crucial point of reference under whose aegis personal beliefs and critical pronouncements on the subjects of politics, religion, and philosophy take on a certain ideological consistency. Further, Mr. Flosky claims that the obscurity and inaccessibility of his Kantian method is the secret to mental health; it is a process of "losing your way, and keeping your mind in perfect health, by perpetual exercise of an interminable quest" (67). His mental health and intellectual pursuits, Mr. Flosky claims, are sustained by the pure enjoyment of an impossible philosophical task. In Nightmare Abbey, ideological consistency and mental health emerge as intimately related to one another, the philosophical subject and the subject of philosophy bound up in the same "interminable quest."

Beyond identifying Coleridge's treatment of Kantian philosophy as a predominant humour upon which to hang its characterization of Mr. Flosky, a technique whereby the subject of discourse becomes the subject as discourse, Nightmare Abbey also provides a critique of one of the perennial sites of critical interest in Coleridge scholarship, one which has developed a particularly sophisticated richness over the last thirty years: the gap in the Biographia Literaria's deduction of the imagination. This trouble spot in Coleridge's monumental work has been understood variously as an instance of philosophical obscurity, brilliant irony, intellectual dishonesty, and as a sign of its author's mental health. (2) In his desynonymizing lecture to the hapless Marionetta O'Carrol, Mr. Flosky demonstrates that the gap in the Biographia's philosophical argument is, indeed, the object of Peacock's satire. Here, Mr. Flosky insists:

Think is not synonymous with believe--for believe, in many most important particulars, results from the total absence, the absolute negation of thought, and is thereby the sane and orthodox condition of the mind; and thought and belief are both essentially different from fancy, and fancy, again, is distinct from imagination. This distinction between fancy and imagination is one of the most abstruse and important points of metaphysics. I have written seven hundred pages of promise to elucidate it.... (83)

In Peacock's satire, the allusion to Coleridge's promised deduction of the imagination in Chapter 13 becomes a specific manifestation of Mr. Flosky's enjoyment-in-deferral of an "interminable quest." Further, the gap occasioned by the non-sequitur association of the Biographia's philosophical endeavor with a preference for "belief" over "thought" is critically astute insofar as it performs its critique of the gap in the Biographia's deduction of the imagination as a gap in the Biographia's logic. What seems merely deferred in the Biographia, Nightmare' Abbey identifies simultaneously as an instance of circumlocutious prevarication and as a site of ideological consistency; "belief" makes orthodoxy and sanity interchangeable in the assertion of their syntactic equality. In the fractured Floskean logic of the passage, "belief" is the condition of the "orthodox" and the "sane," not because it is philosophically sound or even logically coherent, but precisely because the ideological consistency it produces is the antithesis of rational thought. Significantly, Nightmare' Abbey aligns the Biographia's key term "imagination" with belief, orthodoxy, and sanity. Nightmare Abbey can thus be read as suggesting that the famous hiatus in the Biographia's argument attaches its reading of Kant to a set of beliefs, an ideologically consistent field of meaning. Perhaps, then, it is fair to say that Nightmare Abbey, in its characterization of Coleridge as Mr. Flosky, offers the possibility of a rudimentary critique of the ideological implications of Coleridge's Kantianism. Such a critique suggests that the Biographia is ultimately more interested in asserting an ideological orthodoxy in politics, religion, and philosophy, than it is in establishing the Copernican revolution in philosophy of Kantian thought as the ground for its claims about the imagination. Simutaneously, this essay maintains, the Biographia reveals the profound implications of this ideological drama for the construction of the Romantic subject.

In the Biographia, Kant is both a privileged figure for Coleridge's autobiographical narrative, a philosopher who "took possession of me as with a giant's hand," and a continuing problem in "the apparent contradictions" Coleridge finds in "the chapter on original apperception," a chapter the Collected Coleridge edition of the Biographia identifies in the Critique of Pure Reason as [section] 16, "The Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception." (3) Not coincidentally, it is in this chapter that Kant argues that the phenomenal self cannot know its own consciousness as an empirical object. (4) Thus by appropriating Kant's model to support its claims for self-consciousness as the ground for the union of subject and object, the Biographia encounters a contradiction that is more than simply "apparent." (5) Building upon the nascent ideological and psychoanalytic implications of Nightmare Abbey's satire, this paper argues that the Biographia, in its inability to adequately represent its philosophical and autobiographical subjects, that is to say its failure to fully link its argument for self-consciousness as the first "postulate in philosophy" in Chapter 12 with its statement on the imagination in Chapter 13, in fact becomes the positive condition for the representation of the implications of Kant's I of transcendental apperception (1.252). As autobiography and philosophy, the Biographia struggles simultaneously to make an account of Coleridge's life and to completely elaborate the implications of the architectonic structure of Kant's revolution as the basis of its own "principles in Politics, Religion, and Philosophy" (1.5).

The Biographia's treatment of the paradox of Kantian self-consciousness both identifies and ultimately denies the unbridgeable gap between the subjectivity it theorizes and the subject to which it refers. The void that is the self-displaced Kantian subject and the Biographia's autobiographical subject are both recognizable as the "cut in the signifying chain" that, according to Jacques Lacan, "verifies the structure of the subject as discontinuity in the real." (6) If, as Lacan suggests, the real is that which resists entry into the symbolic order, then the Biographia's awkward critical engagement with Kant's I of transcendental apperception suggests the ideological implications of Lacan's formulation of the subject as the point where the real and the symbolic orders meet. (7) Seen from a Lacanian perspective, the notorious difficulties of chapters 12 and 13 cease to be the site of an exclusively philosophical/theological crisis and become instead the site where the ideologically interpellated autobiographical subject emerges as a function of the struggle with the problem of self-consciousness in Chapter 9. (8)

The invitation to a psychoanalytic reading of self-consciousness in the Biographia, and specifically of the gap between chapters 12 and 13, has not gone unanswered. But as this essay is indebted to those earlier studies, it significantly diverges from them. While such studies have adeptly linked the ideological implications of the text to the construction of its autobiographical subject, they have done so in such a way as to render the philosophical project of the Biographia largely irrelevant. (9) Thus critics such as Gayatri Spivak correctly argue that most approaches to the Biographia focus on developing a response to the issue of "Coleridge's prevarication" and thus are concerned with "only the logical or 'figurative' (as customarily understood) inconsistencies in Chapters Twelve and Thirteen of the Biographia Literaria" (226). (10) While Spivak identifies the Biographia's combination of postponements and argumentative gaps as examples of the Lacanian master themes of desire and castration, she forgoes a detailed discussion of the Biographia as it performs the emergence of the Lacanian subject, and thus marginalizes the ideological implications of this subject for the Biographia's counterrevolutionary treatment of the history of philosophy. The power of Spivak's approach is acknowledged by Jerome Christensen in his tacit use of the Lacanian play between the emergence of the letter and the disappearance of the subject in his discussion of "the letter from a friend" in the Biographia's Chapter 13. (11) Christensen takes Spivak's reading of the Biographia as autobiography one deconstructive step further by arguing that the Biographia is "[n]ot an autobiography, the literary life is propaedeutic toward one" (119). As Christensen argues, the Biographia's chapters dealing with German philosophy are more or less irrelevant to the text's attempt to articulate a philosophy of self-consciousness since Coleridge's "refutation" of Hartley's associationism in chapters 5-7 actually "unsettles the authority of the writer [Coleridge]" (30). Thus, for Christensen, Coleridge has effectively disappeared from the Biographia before Chapter 9. While both of these excellent studies focus their critique on the disappearance of the subject, they largely disregard the ideological implications of what they observe for the claims the Biographia makes about history.

Forest Pyle offers an analysis of the Biographia that attempts to reveal the intrinsic link between its autobiographical and philosophical subject. (12) In his Ideology of the Imagination, he argues that the Biographia's statement on the imagination simultaneously "both fails to fulfill its narrative expectations and simultaneously succeeds in proposing a model of subjectivity to be instituted on the basis of a 'fundamental' division" (35). While accepting the general outline of Pyle's thesis, the present essay, however, resists "the 'materiality' of ideology" in Pyle's "return [...] to Althusser" (22), recognizing instead the fantasmatic nature of both the subject and ideology as adumbrated by Slavoj Zizek. The present essay, then, follows Zizek's challenge to Althusser's notion of ideology, wherein "[t]he point is not just that we must unmask the structural mechanism which is producing the effect of the subject as ideological misrecognition, but that we must at the same time fully acknowledge this misrecognition as unavoidables--that is, we must accept a certain delusion as a condition of our historical activity, of assuming a role as agent of the historical process." (13) This "certain delusion" is the ideological fantasy that necessarily occludes the traumatic void of the Lacanian real behind ideology's mystifications. From the perspective of Zizek's Lacan, the ontological necessity of Mr. Flosky's enjoyment in his interminable quest finds its explanation in the fantasmatic nature of both the subject and ideology.

Commenting upon Lacan's formulation of the subject, Zizek constructs a paradigm applicable to the Biographia's own dramatization of subject-making as a fundamentally ideological process: "'I think' only insofar as I am inaccessible to myself qua noumenal thing which thinks. The Thing [I] is originally lost and the fantasy object (a) fills out its void." (14) In the Biographia, the fantasy that it has completed, and in fact removed, its fully elaborated argument for self-consciousness as the ground of...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.