Reviews 441 Strubel, Sturz der Tage in die Nacht , 2012)� These narratives recall Wolf’s images of symptomatic bodies that are denied agency but read their own inscription to find truth about the past, whereas the post- Wende protagonists, as Klocke argues, encounter heightened aggression but little resolution� A readable and informative study, Inscription and Rebellion illuminates East German medical discourse and reminds readers of the continuing impact of the GDR past on unified Germany, establishing the “relevance of the GDR past and GDR institutions in post-unification Germany” (185)� Klocke also sheds light on the issue of social control present in the FRG, which, as she suggests, often self-servingly demonized GDR practices as the “abject other�” Highlighting both the constructive and detrimental aspects of socialist medicine (perpetuated due to personnel continuities), this monograph delivers important insights about the “inscription” of symptoms onto the human body� Ultimately, the discussed narratives may be less about “rebellion” than about the reading of physical suffering, alterity, and experience in the service of humanism� Miami University of Ohio Nicole Thesz Leif Weatherby: Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx. New York: Fordham UP, 2016. 462 pp. $ 35.00 It has become a commonplace of German literary and intellectual history to term early Romantic metaphysics “organic,” and we might- - facilely- - construe this term as meaning “synthesizing” or “nature-based�” But what did the term “organ” mean to the Romantics themselves? And how did each individual thinker uniquely construe and deploy it? With Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ Leif Weatherby sets himself the ambitious task of tracing organological thought, not merely beginning from Fichte, as the subtitle states, but within an array of philosophers, scientists, and literary writers too extensive to enumerate� He traces the concept from Aristotle and Galen, to Descartes and Leibniz, to Schiller, Kant, Herder, and Vaihinger� Then, with a focus on early Romanticism, he devotes a chapter each to Hölderlin, Schelling, and Novalis, followed by a chapter on Goethe’s revision of organology� The final section, entitled “Instead of an Epilogue,” contains the seeds of a book unto itself� It leaves Romanticism behind and considers a later version of organology: the “economic metaphysics” of Karl Marx (318)� In the introduction, Weatherby requests that readers suspend their contemporary understanding of the term “organ,” and stresses that “ organology is not 442 Reviews biological, ” and the Romantic universe “not alive, not organic ” (33)� Instead, he posits the organ as “that location which bears a function, that place that performs work […]; its problematic is that of the meaning and location of function as such” (9)� Weatherby states that this concept of organology is close to that of Gilbert Simondon ( Du mode d’existence des objects techniques , 1989) and Bernard Stiegler ( For a New Critique of Political Economy, 2010), yet he also argues that it originated with the Romantics: Organology is the study of infra-objects, of usable parts that might be repurposed […]� The units ‘object,’ ‘body,’ and even ‘process’ are discarded in favor of the study of multifunctional instruments� We do not live in the Classical world of subject, object, and society, but in the weird world of symbiotic and antagonistic organs� Romantic organology is the origin of this way of looking at the world� (9) The chapters on Hölderlin, Schelling, and Novalis, which form the heart of the book, delineate how the early Romantics developed a “technological metaphysics” able not only to “tell the intertwining histories of nature and human cognition as a single story,” but to intervene in these histories in order to “produce something radically new” (124—25)� This metaphysics creates an ongoing dialectic between the real and the possible by means of a tool-- the organ-- that “makes more tools out of the material on which it works” (127)� While focusing on a real area of application, it simultaneously focuses on the interplay between knowledge and action inside this area� Constant reproduction of the point of interface between being and thought makes “the totality of orders flowing from that point available for alteration” (128)� Although being had been “put in brackets” by Kant, the Romantics broke this deadlock by both allowing being its “alien properties” and always insisting that “being be workable” (126, 128)� For Hölderlin, whom Weatherby views as “the inaugural thinker of Romantic organology,” organs became dialectical: “at once structure and development, […] sensual and rational, […] form and content” (132—33)� In order to present such opposition- - especially that between judgment and being- - Hölderlin turned to genre theory and made tragedy a privileged organ� Through a reading of Der Tod des Empedocles , Weatherby finds that the play “raises the possibility of the application of metaphysical knowledge to concrete situations” (164)� In particular-- and in an almost Brechtian move-- he argues that the limitations of figures in the tragedy who strive to understand Empedocles prompt audience members toward dialectical thinking (164—65)� The next chapter considers how Schelling resumed Kant’s search for etwas Drittes capable of performing a synthesis between subjective and objective cognition� This third thing, termed “organ” by Schelling, would enable a transcendental philosophy in which “the subject becomes its own object” (198)� In the following chapter, Weatherby finds Reviews 443 Novalis to be the most radical of organological thinkers, especially within the sphere of politics� For Novalis, organology construes the world as the constant intersection of possibility and actuality, thereby making the world “fully potentially constructible” (236)� Weatherby considers Die Lehrlinge zu Sais to be “the most organological of all aesthetic productions,” for “nearly every voice in the fragment includes a consideration of instrumentality” (222—23)� Weatherby’s expository style posed some frustrations for this reader� It often seemed that just when a topic was becoming clear and compelling, the author cycled back to consider its intellectual precursors or gestured forward to upcoming parts of the argument (the phrase “as we shall see” is strewn liberally through the text)� This leaves the reader repeatedly torn between analepsis and prolepsis, and too briefly on secure footing along the path of a main argument� Weatherby is a nimble thinker with a lot of ground to cover, yet the pace at which he moves-- in manifold directions-- can be disorienting� Indeed, on occasion the author himself loses his discursive bearings� For example, the chapter on “Universal Organs” contains sixteen lines of text that are repeated, verbatim, just four pages later (211, 215)� Further, a key to abbreviations at the beginning of the Notes section would have been a very welcome navigational aid� The quibbles above aside, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ represents a massive undertaking, ably executed� The scope of this project is so broad that its mere completion- - let alone with such lucidity and precision- - warrants praise� Given the study’s wide historico-philosophical sweep, its literary analyses remain, necessarily, brief, yet Weatherby’s groundbreaking findings will no doubt stimulate innovative readings of Romantic texts in the future� For example, though the book nowhere mentions Kleist, it opens intriguing points of application to Kleist’s dramas, particularly to Die Hermannsschlacht, a play that seeks to intervene historically while also representing the very process of representation . In short, Weatherby’s study is itself a tool that will generate more tools� It thus constitutes important reading for scholars of German Idealism and Romanticism, as well as for those interested in the intersections of philosophy and science� University of Delaware Nancy Nobile