Many scholars find Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenäum fragments to be bewildering, with their import often reduced to either introducing the genre of fragments or stressing the primacy of wit. Just as often, the fragments are simply brushed aside entirely as enthusiastic but artistically disappointing endeavours. Inevitable attempts to unite the fragments into elements of a complete system fail abortively, for the fragments are incomprehensible as a unified statement. Yet it is precisely this incomprehensibility that Michel Chaouli boldly claims is intentional: the fragments are not metonymical parts of a whole, as has often been argued, but are rather combinatorial units in a system designed to highlight processes rather than any end result. Eighteenth-century chemistry offers Chaouli the best analogy for the constant recombinations within the system, not just on the level of the fragments combining with each other and their respective meanings, but also for the words within sentences and even down to individual syllables and letters. The systematic totality that ensues is intentionally destabilised, and linked to aesthetic theory in a way that alarmingly suggests that social bonds, like the fragments, are vulnerable to sudden dissolution.

Schlegel’s use of chemical terms in the fragments has been noticed before. Both Matthew Tanner and Peter Kapitza have seized upon the prevalence of chemical metaphors in Schlegel’s writing, particularly as they relate to more general Naturphilosophie. It is surprising and somewhat negligent, given the correlation of their initial observations with Chaouli’s own, that Chaouli footnotes each on only rare occasions and offers no holistic attempt to place their foundational work within his system. However, the book is otherwise exhaustively researched, with appropriate and particular attention paid to the theoretical implications of his work.

Given the subtitle of Chaouli’s book – “Chemistry and Poetics in the Work of Friedrich Schlegel” – many readers will expect a discussion of contemporary chemistry and its potential applicability to Schlegel, and here Chaouli does not disappoint. To his great credit, Chaouli avoids the typical approach taken by many when examining Romanticism vis-à-vis science, which is to compare general Romantic philosophies only loosely with various tenets of science or mathematics. Chaouli remains rigorously fixated upon very specific eighteenth-century knowledge of chemistry and applies these concepts to a narrow band of writing in Schlegel’s oeuvre, the fragments. He begins not with science, but with the centrality of incomprehensibility to understanding the Schlegelian system. Schlegel’s experiments with language and its recombinations should not be understood as pure playfulness, he argues, but rather as intentional adherence to the logic of combinatorial chemistry, whose very unpredictability renders it a better metaphor for poetics than the much better understood sciences of physics or mathematics.

His critique is particularly valuable in its coupling of the chemical analogy with aesthetic and social theory, which enables Chaouli not only to turn from Kantian metonymical dialectics to a focus on processes, but also to recast the tumultuous interruptions and recombinations inherent in the web of fragments as “not an intrusion from outside, but rather a defining feature” (201) of the process itself. Unlike foundational philosophy, the chemical model thus intentionally “begins and ends in a messy middle” (211). In this way Chaouli links politics to interruption, and with it Schlegel’s sense of irony, always a problematic concept demanding new revision.

Despite the occasional misguided tendency to argue for the truth of post-structuralist thought as a goal in itself, Chaouli’s monogram succeeds in navigating through established critical perspectives and lucidly interweaving a unique system to explain the de-centred and destabilised foundation of the fragments. His efforts could perhaps be better summarized as clever synthesis rather than inspired genesis, but ultimately he succeeds where so many others have failed; namely, in applying a coherent explanation of the fragments that not only accounts for their inconsistencies, but indeed relies upon them.

KEVIN YEE Duke University