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 (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 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 condition of the mind; and and 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. …