Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895–1975), Russian philosopher and cultural theorist whose influence is pervasive in a wide range of academic disciplines – from literary hermeneutics to the epistemology of the human sciences, cultural theory, and feminism. He may legitimately be called a philosophical anthropologist in the venerable Continental tradition. Because of his seminal work on Rabelais and Dostoevsky’s poetics, his influence has been greatest in literary hermeneutics.
Without question dialogism, or the construal of dialogue, is the hallmark of Bakhtin’s thought. Dialogue marks the existential condition of humanity in which the self and the other are asymmetrical but double-binding. In his words, to exist means to communicate dialogically, and when the dialogue ends, everything else ends. Unlike Hegelian and Marxian dialectics but like the Chinese correlative logic of yin and yang, Bakhtin’s dialogism is infinitely polyphonic, open-ended, and indeterminate, i.e., ‘unfinalizable’ – to use his term. Dialogue means that there are neither first nor last words. The past and the future are interlocked and revolve around the axis of the present.
Bakhtin’s dialogism is paradigmatic in a threefold sense. First, dialogue is never abstract but embodied. The lived body is the material condition of social existence as ongoing dialogue. Not only does the word become enfleshed, but dialogue is also the incorporation of the self and the other. Appropriately, therefore, Bakhtin’s body politics may be called a Slavic version of Tantrism. Second, the Rabelaisian carnivalesque that Bakhtin’s dialogism incorporates points to the ‘jesterly’ politics of resistance and protest against the ‘priestly’ establishment of officialdom. Third, the most distinguishing characteristic of Bakhtin’s dialogism is the primacy of the other over the self, with a twofold consequence: one concerns ethics and the other epistemology. In modern philosophy, the discovery of ‘Thou’ or the primacy of the other over the self in asymmetrical reciprocity is credited to Feuerbach. It is hailed as the ‘Copernican revolution’ of mind, ethics, and social thought. Ethically, Bakhtin’s dialogism, based on heteronomy, signals the birth of a new philosophy of responsibility that challenges and transgresses the Anglo-American tradition of ‘rights talk.’ Epistemologically, it lends our welcoming ears to the credence that the other may be right – the attitude that Gadamer calls the soul of dialogical hermeneutics.
See also BUBER, FEUERBACH , GADAMER , HERMENEUTICS , PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHRO — POLOGY. H.Y.J.