ABSTRACT
S. T Coleridge’s biographical and literary life was long in the making. Before 1815, the year of the book’s composition, Coleridge’s letters and notebooks abound with material which was eventually to be incorporated in the Biographia. For Coleridge, associationist philosophy is the assault of chaos upon the unity of mind – and, as well as reducing individual subjectivity to the litter of matter, it also dissolves divine subjectivity into nothingness. Along with his critique of materialism as the dissolution of self, Coleridge relates material literality to atomised subjectivity. Gayatri Spivak, writing on the play between knowing and being in Coleridge’s text, says that the Biographia’s argument on the imagination moves to the point “whereby its presentation would be identical with its proof.” The imaginary letter does, however, dramatise what Christensen called Coleridge’s “most literal fear” – his fear of the letter.
