Abstract
This chapter presents an attempt to come to terms with one of the key issues of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work, which could be expressed in the form of the following question: What was the event or the events of thinking, in the twentieth-century philosophy and humanities, which this Russian philosopher and humanistic scholar (1895–1975) participated in and responded to, according to his own concepts of “participative thinking” and an “actively responsive understanding.” My essay responds to this question by laying out an access to these major Bakhtinian concepts, with the help of the category of “historicity” (Geschichtlichkeit in German, istorichnost’ in Russian), a term used here in its hermeneutical or “dialogic” sense of open-endedness of both some cultural past and an interpretive “outsideness” to that past, or vnenakhodimost’, to use Bakhtin’s well-known term. Within the contexts of the so-called Bakhtin studies, in both Russia and the West, the subject of the present essay would be the “in-between,” that is, some meaningful distance between this author’s heritage and the “first hundred years” of Bakhtin’s reception history.
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Notes
- 1.
See the 1943 fragment under this title in vol. 5 of Bakhtin’s Collected Works (Bakhtin 1996, 63–71). The emphasis on the methodological differentiation between “official” and “unofficial” culture and consciousness culminating on the last page of the Rabelais book, appears for the first time, to my knowledge, as early as the 1927 book about Freudianism, where the “content” of consciousness is differentiated into “ontological” (i.e., “unofficial”) and “ideological” (i.e., official or rhetoric) motifs. See Voloshinov 1976, 85.
- 2.
In his later philosophy of literature and the novel Bakhtin described the “constellation of problems” in the ideological and literary culture of the Renaissance (Rabelais) and of the German renaissance of the eighteenth century (Lessing, Herder, Goethe). He showed that in both epochs new forms of time and temporal representation arose in response to a common or communal crisis: “A new chronotope was needed that would permit one to link real life (history) to the real earth. It was necessary to oppose to eschatology a creative and generative time, a time measured by creative acts, by growth and not by destruction” (Bakhtin 1981, 204, 206). Bakhtin’s own epoch was, no doubt, characteristic of a similar crisis and response to it in philosophy and the humanities.
- 3.
In his 1973 conversations with the philologist Victor Duvakin, Bakhtin said that the Soviet century had meant for him a falling out, as it were, from his own biography, a life-long catastrophe “beginning, of course, not from childhood, not from the youth on, but from the October Revolution on” (Bakhtin 2002, 219). One may find a phenomenological description of the biography/autobiography in Bakhtin 1990, 150–166.
- 4.
The ultimate case of this “heteroglossia” [raznorechie] was (and sometimes still is, mostly in the West) Bakhtin’s “Marxism,” that is, his ability as a non-Marxist to express his “developing idea,” under the concrete circumstances of the times, in the language of the official discourse.
- 5.
Bocharov wrote in his invaluable essay about Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky book: “Above all, I believed (and still believe) that the turn from the philosophical criticism of Dostoevsky practiced at the beginning of the century toward a structural-eidetic examination of his works, such as Bakhtin achieved in his book, was highly productive and was what enabled him to say that ‘new word’” (Bocharov and Liapunov 1994, 1013).
- 6.
Bakhtin initiated this kind of philosophical criticism of the humanities in his 1924 treatise on the aesthetics and literary studies of his day, and continued it, more or less explicitly, in subsequent decades. The best example is, perhaps, his “Discourse in the Novel,” where he criticized philologists who, with their traditional empirical methods, failed to come to terms with novelistic discourse: “Many do not even see or recognize the philosophical roots of the stylistics (and linguistics) in which they work and shy away from any fundamental philosophical issues. […] Others—more principled—make a case for consistent individualism in their understanding of language and style” (Bakhtin 1981, 267).
- 7.
Hannah Arendt writes: “The world lies between people, and this in-between—much more (than is often thought) men and even man—is today the object of the greatest concern and the most obvious upheaval in almost all the countries of the globe” (Arendt 1993, 4). Compare this to Bakhtin: “We are most inclined to imagine ideological creation as some inner process of understanding, comprehension, and perception, and do not notice that it in fact unfolds externally, for the eye, the ear, the hand. It is not within us, but between us” (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1978, 8). However, Bakhtin’s theory of ideological creation is represented in his Author and Hero from the early 1920s. See Bakhtin 1990.
- 8.
That article was published in the journalThe Russian Contemporary edited by Gorky and Zamiatin. Bakhtin wrote his essay on the transformation of traditional aesthetics and literary studies for that journal (1924), but the latter was prohibited by the Bolsheviks, and Bakhtin, as usual, simply gave up the work. The written part of it (Bakhtin 1990, 257–318) was published fifty years later without an actual response, and not for political reasons. Today his 1924 essay is particularly difficult to penetrate for both philosophers and philologists.
- 9.
This was brilliantly demonstrated in Vladimir Nikiforov’s monograph The Collapse of Philosophy and Its Rebirth, the first full-scale philosophical study in English, to my knowledge, that analyzes Bakhtin’s dialogues in connection with pre-war philosophy (mostly German and Russian). See Nikiforov 2006. However, the decisive event of the “paradigm shift” in philosophy during and after World War I is not principally taken into consideration in this study.
- 10.
In a 1962 letter to a literary critic Vadim Kozhinov, in response to the latter’s question about Heidegger (cf. the journalMoskva 1992, issue November/December, 180), Bakhtin wrote that the “determining influence” [opredeliaiuschee vliianie] on him came from Husserl, and that among Husserl’s disciples he was particularly impressed by Max Scheler and his personalism. Any “influence” on Bakhtin, however, should not be exaggerated: “Even when Bakhtin accepted and appropriated others’ ideas,” a recent scholar writes in connection with Scheler, “he reshaped them to his own purposes” (Denischenko 2017, 257, n. 5). Indeed, Bakhtin as philosopher cannot be seen without his concrete intellectual background; yet his thought cannot be understood with the help of the “sources” he “read.”
- 11.
In his 1954 article on “The History of the Dialogical Principle” Martin Buber recollected how struck he had been by the similarities between his own thoughts and the ideas of his contemporaries, who, like himself, did not know each other during the Great War. While preparing for publication of his I and Thou (1923) he read Ferdinand Ebner’ s Das Wort und die geistigen Realitäten (1921) and experienced a shock: so close to him was that unknown “dialogic” Catholic thinker. “His book,” Buber wrote decades later, “showed to me, as no other book since then (for, sometimes the text seemed to be almost unbelievably akin to my thoughts), that in such times as ours, men of different molds and traditions were all in search of the common heritage in its upheaval” (Buber 1962, 298).
- 12.
According to Michael Theunissen, the line of thought he called the “contemporary socialontology,” with the concept of the “other” at its center, was developed, between 1917 and 1923, in two principled directions: the “transcendental” one (Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre), and the “dialogic” one (Buber, Scheler, Rosenstock-Huessy, Guardini, and many others). What is today called Bakhtin’s “dialogism” is, I believe, a specific (and specifically Russian) unity of both directions later transformed into some sort of metaphilosophy, that is, “on the borders of all […] disciplines, at their junctures and points of intersection” (Bakhtin 1986, 103).
- 13.
In Bakhtin’s programmatic fragment from 1921 to 1922 (thus, long before his “disputed” 1929 book on the philosophy of language) the very motif of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy is clarified: “I think that language is much more adapted to giving utterance precisely to that truth, and not to the abstract moment of the logical in its purity. That which is abstract, in its purity, is indeed unutterable: any expression is much too concrete for pure meaning—it distorts and dulls the purity and validity-in-itself of meaning. That is why in abstract thinking we never understand an expression in its full sense” (Bakhtin 1993, 31).
- 14.
It seems that Sergei Averintsev was the first to identify, in his 1976 review article, Aristotle as Bakhtin’s “true and greatest” adversary or opponent, with the whole intellectual tradition he had established in the history of scientific philosophy (Averintsev 2010, 99–100). Yet Averintsev stressed, within the Soviet chronotope, Bakhtin’s opposition to the Aristotelian poetics. The alternative idea of “prosaics” introduced by the American scholars Morson and Emerson in their well-known book stressed Aristotle’sethics in relation to the early Bakhtin, not, however, in relation to the “unity of the emerging (developing) idea” (Morson and Emerson 1990).
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Makhlin, V.L. (2021). Future-in-the-Past: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Thought Between Heritage and Reception. In: Bykova, M.F., Forster, M.N., Steiner, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62982-3_29
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