To Read a Bull: Nominalism, Commodification, and Negative Dialectics in the Biographia Literaria

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ABSTRACTThis essay reconsiders Biographia Literaria’s footnote on “mak[ing] a bull” through Coleridge’s treatment of the problem of nominalism. Coleridge critiques nominalism as a philosophical, political, and aesthetic problem of disunity exemplified in the work of John Locke. Yet a series of passages linked to the (false) unity of the bull, which “consists in the bringing together two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of their connection,” suggests that Coleridge also worries about the contrary problem of undesired poetic and social unities. Even as the bull’s feeling of connection makes it troublingly analogous to the imagination, I argue, the form of the bull also implies a model of critical reading that decomposes false connections. Such a process of reading a bull, the implications of which become most clear when read alongside the work of Theodor Adorno, entails a negative dialectics that stages the dialectical inversion of the imagination’s own synthesizing power. Recurring in passages that dramatize the Biographia’s persistent anxieties regarding mass print production and the commodification of poetry, the form of the bull thus suggests a desynonymizing materialist dialectic that departs from the increasingly conservative implications of Coleridge’s idealism.