Charles I. Armstrong. Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ISBN: 1403904758. Price: US$85.00.

Charles I. Armstrong’s Romantic Organicism: From Idealist Origins to Ambivalent Afterlife is a lucid, compelling, and well-written account of reflections on organicism in both the German and British Romantic traditions, as well its “afterlife” in twentieth century literary and philosophical thought. As Armstrong notes in his Introduction, the methodology of Romantic Organicism aims at both “a ‘deconstruction’ of the organicist heritage ... provoked in part by simplistic (and often seemingly unconscious) recuperations of this tradition in modern thought and criticism,” as well as “a ‘reconstruction’ of the underestimated fecundity and complexity of romantic organicism” (2). As this description suggests, Romantic Organicism is neither an attempt to debunk Romantic organicism (à la Paul de Man), nor is it precisely an attempt to recuperate organicism. Rather, Armstrong seeks to confront the reader with what he contends are the “inherent problems of organicism” (133), while at the same time making it clear that the projects of philosophical and literary criticism must engage these “persistent aporias” (138), for attempts to ignore or sidestep them often end up adopting, though in confused form, precisely the premises of organicism they seek to reject. Focusing especially on the relationships between organicism and the sacred book, the limit-experience, and the problem of community, Romantic Organicism develops provocative readings of prose and poetic texts from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Part Two is entitled “English Romanticism,” but in fact it focuses exclusively on the poetry and prose of S. T. Coleridge and William Wordsworth. In his two chapters on Coleridge, Armstrong argues that Coleridge’s version of organicism, like those of many of his German predecessors, tended toward a “conservative” form (53). Chapter four demonstrates this tendency toward the criterion of hierarchy through readings of later prose texts such as Aids to Reflection, Biographia Literaria, On the Constitution of Church and State, The Philosophical Lectures, and The Statesman’s Manual, while chapter five comes to similar conclusions by analyzing Coleridge’s earlier poems on friendship. Chapter six focuses on Wordsworth’s description of The Recluse as a gothic cathedral, and Armstrong argues that this architectural metaphor invokes a “spatial organicism” (111) that also finds itself beset by the tension between the principles of hierarchy and interrelationship. While Armstrong’s diagnosis of conservatism in the latter Coleridge and Wordsworth will not come as a surprise to many, the chapter on Coleridge’s early poetry is an especially intriguing part of the book, for it delimits both a new genre--the Coleridgean “friendship” poem (related, but not identical, to the conversation poem)--and a compelling account of the ways in which the category of “the friend” links Coleridge’s early work on the system of Pantisocracy with his later theoretical work on organicism. Part Three takes leave of the nineteenth century in order to focus on the fate of organicism in twentieth century philosophy and literary criticism. Chapter 7 compares the “moderate” literary criticism of I. A. Richards with Georges Bataille’s theoretical reflections on excess; Chapter 8 discusses the hermeneutic theory of Hans-Georg Gadamer; and Chapter 9 compares Maurice Blanchot’s and Jacques Derrida’s attempts to “set aside organicism in order to replace it with the alternative, ontotypological figure of the text” (160). Perhaps predictably, both Richards’s and Gadamer’s projects of literary criticism are presented as ultimately unsuccessful attempts to “dissemble” the aporias of organicism through “ad hoc” solutions (145), while the work of Bataille, Blanchot, and Derrida are presented in a more positive light, in large part because all three accept the necessity of these “inherent problems” (133). As in many accounts of twentieth century French thought, Bataille’s work is presented as “anticipat[ing] and …