BAKHTIN, M. M.

BAKHTIN, M. M. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975) was a literary critic, philosopher, and leading Russian humanist. He was banished in 1929 to Kazakhstan, but his work was rediscovered after World War II and introduced to Europeans by Julia Kristeva and others. To Bakhtin, perhaps more than anyone, is owed the current attention to intertextuality, the otherness of others' voices, insistence on the moral and epistemological significance of differences, and "dialogism."

A classically trained linguist, Bakhtin challenged Russian formalist followers of Ferdinand de Saussure, insisting that basic speech units are not phonemes or words but specific, often "double-voiced," utterances instantiating historical matrices. Apprised of developments in the arts, sciences, and philosophy by fellow members of "the Bakhtin circle," he anticipated Ludwig Wittgenstein on "private language," dismissed as "monological" all religious and secular ideological systems, and rejected formulaic dialectics.

Bakhtin made his name with a 1929 study of Fyodor Dostoevsky. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky, unlike Leo Tolstoy, did not direct readers to a single moralizing conclusion but initiated open-ended conversations among his characters concerning bourgeois crises of faith, love, crime, and punishment. Dostoevsky's journalistic/Christian authorial voice allowed them their conflicting (often inner) voices, giving his novels a "polyphonic" form, avoiding psychologism and capturing the rich realism of everyday discourse.

Adapting Henri Bergson on organic temporal processes and Hermann Cohen's neo-Kantian ethico-aesthetic holistic judgments, Bakhtin found the same dialogical imagination exercised in age-old folkloric critiques of establishment pretensions in Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Dostoevsky. Unconstrained by classical literary canons, Bakhtin believed that the prose of modern novelists, not poetry, best communicates orientational pluralism.

According to Bakhtin, François Rabelais first textualized oral satirical traditions, embodying Renaissance resistance to the hegemony of medieval Christendom. Rabelais used accepted, grotesque medieval tropes and bawdy carnivalesque humor to ridicule inquisitors who pretended to eternal verities while pursuing mundane goals. His countercultural apocalypticism undermined homogenizing dogmatism. Rabelais worked prototypically, honoring the specifics of his historical locale (his "chronotope"), working through national and international conflicts to a global conception of liberating truth.

Bakhtin's study covertly critiqued Stalinism, expecting the dissonance of social injustices and insights prompted by multilingual encounters to foster public, not just private, reforms. Gods and tyrants are dethroned by laughter.

In his earliest, more phenomenological studies, Bakhtin examined the complexity of authorial artistry and asymmetries of self–other relations. People theorize about their background, but they never see it, nor others theirs. Recognizing "transgredience" (not transcendence) in one's experience breaks with both classical and modern single-consciousness models of knowing (God's or the individual ego's) and mind–body dualism. No theories are final, all boundaries in "threshold" situations are permeable. Inside–outside dichotomies miss the "outsideness" of every thought, and one's dialogical dependence on others for true wholes. Actual texts embody simultaneously many contexts. Both sciences and humanities interweave descriptions and evaluations. Neither authorial intention nor reader responses alone determine dialogically realized meanings.

Such conclusions, reworked in many notes on form, content, material, style, genre, and representational discourse, constitute an independent Russian contribution to postmodernism. Bakhtin's influence on religious studies remains mostly indirect. In the 1970s Robert Polzin pioneered in applying Bakhtinian ideas to the Deuteronomic histories, and later Gavin Flood followed Bakhtin "beyond phenomenology."

Most Christian commentators agree that Bakhtin's sense of overlapping meanings and contrasting, simultaneous perspectives was influenced by Orthodox iconography based on a kenotic two-natures Christology and paradoxical space–time conceptions of quantum physicists. Not logocentric, Bakhtin insisted that the world is in our words and words are of the world. Living languages are "unfinalizable" philosophies of life. Because human operative judgments realize some freedom in weighing alternatives, people are without alibi for their lives, answerable to themselves, others, and their environment, which address them on many levels. Bakhtinian answerability is a richer notion than Heideggerian authenticity, affirming both individual responsibility and corporate accountability.

Despite his circumstances, Bakhtin de-emphasized the dark side of human nature. He agreed with Thomas Mann that hell is lack of being heard. Wisely, he generally let Dostoevsky and Rabelais speak for him on Christianity, denying that individuals own ideas. In all discourse, Bakhtin came to regard God as the "Super-Addressee," the basis for the human drive for perfect understanding, a third or fourth voice on the dialogical edge of consciousness, impersonally called "the voice of conscience" but not just a regulative idea. Bakhtin dismissed talk of absolute values and "the collective unconscious" as abstractions. Actual consummating responses must be concretely personal. He remarked that Ludwig Feuerbach misread the double-voiced import of incarnation, while the church drained the blood out of history. Ethico-aesthetically, in the artistry of making a life, what I must be for the other, God (however named) is for me.

Bakhtinian dialogism is opposed to any dichotomizing between the sciences and the humanities in the study of religion and to treating religion in isolation from the texture of, or reducing it to, either its ideal or its material aspects.

See Also

Literature, articles on Critical Theory and Religious Studies, Literature and Religion.

Bibliography

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Russian, 1929, 1963). Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, 1984.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World (Russian, 1940). Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, Ind., 1984.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist; translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, Tex., 1981.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tex., 1986.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov; translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin, Tex., 1990.

Bakhtin, Mikhail (and/or Voloshinov, V. N.). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. London, 1986. Influential 1929 book by a member of the Bakhtin circle, sometimes attributed to Bakhtin, but more Marxist than his other writings.

Coates, Ruth. Christianity in Bakhtin: God and the Exiled Author. Cambridge, UK, 1998. Discusses Bakhtin's relation to Marxism.

Felch, Susan M., and Paul J. Contino, eds. Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith. Evanston, Ill., 2001. Mostly theological.

Gardiner, Michael, ed. Mikhail Bakhtin. 4 vols. London, 2003. To date, four volumes of many important articles have been published on Bakhtin's context and relation to such authors as Cassirer and Buber.

Green, Barbara. Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical Scholarship: An Introduction. Atlanta, 2000. Includes a bibliography.

Haynes, Deborah J. Bakhtin and the Visual Arts. Cambridge, U.K., 1995. Gives Russian nuances.

Peter Slater (2005)