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Augusto Ponzio (Bari, Italy)

From moral philosophy
to philosophy of literature:
Bakhtin from 1919 to 1929

A text by Mikhail M. Bakhtin from the early 1920s, but published in Russia under the editorship of S.G.Bocharov only in 1986 with the title «K filosofii postupka» (see: "Filosofiia i sotsiologiia nauki i tekniki: Ezhegodnik, 1984_85". Moscow: Nauka, 1986, pp.82_138), is of great interest not only because of its intrinsic theoretical value, but also as a key to a global understanding of Bakhtin's research and writings extending into the first half of the 1970s. The subject of this text is closely related to the first chapter of a longer work — it too from the early 1920s — published as «Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity» in the 1979 collection of Bakhtin's writings, «Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva». Considered as fragmentary, this chapter in the Russian original was excluded from the 1979 volume and published in the above mentioned 1986 volume edited by Bocharov; having also been excluded from the 1988 Italian translation it has now appeared in a volume of 1993, edited by P.Jachia and A.Ponzio, «Bachtin e …», entitled «L'autore e l'eroe nell'attivitа estetica. Frammento del primo capitolo»¹. The connection between the two texts in question, «Toward a Philosophy of the Act» (which I have rendered in Italian as «La filosofia dell'azione responsabile», i.e., «The Philosophy of Answering Action»²) and the fragment from the first chapter of «Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity», published in English as «Supplementary Section» to the latter³ is immediately obvious because of the repetition of passages and reference to the same poem by Pushkin, Razluka (Parting).

«Toward a Philosophy of the Act», which was only to be the beginning of a vast philosophical project designed to produce a volume in moral philosophy, consists of two large fragments: probably an introduction (with a few initial pages missing) to the pro

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ject, and another section entitled by the author as «I».

In the introductory fragment, Bakhtin considers the problem of the possibility of capturing the moment of «transitiveness» and «event-ness» («sobytijnost'») (cf. p.1)⁴, of the act in its valuableness and unity of actual becoming and self-determination. As soon as the sense of such an act is determined from a theoretical — scientific, philosophical, historiographical — or aesthetic viewpoint, it loses its character of a unique and self-determined event, a truly lived act, to take on a generic value, an abstract meaning. A division is created between two mutually impervious worlds: the world of life and the world of culture; and yet we exist in the first even when we cognize, contemplate and create, that is, when we build a world in which life is the object of a given domain of culture. These two worlds are united by the unique event of the act of our activity, of living experience, being the unity of two-sided answerability: answerablity with respect to objective meaning, that is, with respect to a content relative to the objective unity of a domain of culture, which Bakhtin calls «special answerability», and answerability with respect to the unique event-ness of the act, which Bakhtin calls «moral answerability» (cf. p.2_3). For unity among these two kinds of answerability, «special answerability must be brought into communion with the unitary and unique moral answerability as a constituent moment in it. That is the only way whereby the pernicious non-fusion and non-interpenetratoin of culture and life could be surmounted» (p.3).

This is the same problem dealt with in what is generally believed to be the first writing ever published by Bakhtin, «Art and Answerability», of 1919, that is, the problem of the relationship between art and life, with a solution perspected in similar terms:

The three domains of human culture — science, art, and life — gain unity only in the individual person who integrates them into his own unity. This union, however, may become mechanical, external. And, unfortunately, that is exactly what most often happens. (…) But what guarantees the inner connection of the constituent elements of a person? Only the unity of answerability. I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art, so that everything I have experienced and understood would not remain ineffectual in my life. But answerablity entails guilt, or
liability to blame. It is not only mutual answerability that art and life must assume, but also mutual liability to blame. (…) The poet must remember that it is his poetry which bears the guilt for the vulgar prose of life, whereas the man of everyday life ought to know that the fruitlessness of art is due to his willingness to be unexacting and to the unseriousness of the concerns in his life. The individual must become answerable through and through: all of his constituent moments must not only fit next to each other in the temporal sequence of his life, but must also interpenetrate each other in the unity of guilt and answerability. (…) Art and life are not one, but they must become united in myself — in the unity of my answerability⁵.

On one hand, therefore, «special answerability», relative to a given domain of culture, a given content, a given role and function, delimited, defined, circumscribed answerability referred to the repeatable identity of the objective and interchangeable individual; on the other hand, «moral answerability», «absolute answerability», without limits, alibis, which alone renders individual action unique, answerability of the single individual that cannot be abdicated. The connection between these two kinds of answerability is that between objective, repetetive, identical meaning conferred by the domain of culture in which action is objectified, and the unrepeatable self-determination of being as a unique and unitary event, activity in its entirety and complexity though not decomposable or classifiable. Here Bakhtin anticipates the criteria used for the distinction between «theme» and «meaning» particularly important in his conception of the sign to which he dedicates an entire chapter in the volume of 1929 signed by Voloshinov.

The act of our activity, of actual experiencing, says Bakhtin, is therefore «a two-faced Janus» (p.2) oriented in two different directions: never-repeatable uniqueness and objective, abstract unity. My answerable activity as a unique individual, wholly identified in a given moment and in given conditions is absolutely indifferent, «completely impervious» (p.4) to the latter. The moment of unique event-ness in which judgment is an answerable act or deed of its author is absolutely indifferent to theoretical meaning, and therefore remains entirely outside thought as generally valid judgment. The theoretical veridicality of judgment does not explain how that judgment is

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the ought of thinking; vice versa the ought cannot ground the theoretical veridicality of judgment; the moment of theoretical veridicality is necessary but not sufficient for it to become an ought-to-be: this is why Bakhtin refuses Rickert's conception of the ought as the highest formal category, and citing Husserl affirms that the assumption of theoretically valid judgment as the ought cannot be derived from it, but rather can only be brought in from the outside. With respect to the ought, to the concrete act of its assumption, theoretical veridicality, says Bakhtin, only has a technical value. This is also the case for all that is aesthetically, scientifically, morally significant: all such meanings have a technical value given that no one of them contains in its content the moment of the ought which resides instead in the unity of my unique answerable life as it is manifested in the uniqueness of answerable choice. The connection between objective, abstract, indifferent validity and the never-repeatable uniqueness of a standpoint, of a choice cannot be explained from within theoretical knowledge, thanks to an abstract theoretical subject, a gnoseological consciousness, precisely because all this has formal, technical validity indifferent to the answerable act of the single individual. Particularly important are Bakhtin's considerations on the autonomy of what is technologically valid, governed by its own immanent laws, acquiring a value of its own, power and dominion over the life of the single individual once it has lost its connection to the live uniqueness of answerable activity. «All that which is technological», says Bakhtin, «when divorced from the once occurent unity of life and surrendered to the will of the law immanent to its development, is frightening; it may from time to time irrupt into this once-occurent unity as an irresponsibly destructive and terrifying force» (p.7).

Bakhtin insists particularly on the alien character of the singularity of life as «answerable, risk-fraught, and open becoming» (p.9) in the world of the constructions by theoretical consciousness with its abstract being, «lightened» of historical existence, determined as something unique and never-repeatable: an absolute estrangement with respect to the world as the object of knowledge in which everything finds a justification except for the singularity of the existential position and of respective answering action. Insofar as by principle it is accomplished, finished, given, theoretical Being is indifferent to «that which is absolutely arbitrary (answerably arbitrary)» (p.9), absolutely new and creative concerning unique life in
tended as continuous answerable activity, «is indifferent to the central fact — central for me — of my unique and actual communion with Being» (p.9) and of my «moral answerability», mine absolutely. And although the «unity-uniqueness» of my life-act remains alien to the indifferent theoretical consciousness, such unity-uniqueness is the foundation of the latter «insofar as the act of cognition as my deed is included, along with all its content, in the unity of its answerability, in which and by virtue of which I actually live — perform deeds» (p.12). Therefore, says Bakhtin,

Once-occurent uniqueness or singularity cannot be thought of, it can only be participatively experienced or lived through. All of theoretical reason in its entirety is only a moment of practical reason, i.e., the reason of the unique subiectum's moral orientation within the event of once-occurent Being (p.13).

Bakhtin demonstrates the uselessness of attempts at recovering the unity-uniqueness of action-life whether through the forms of the reductionism of theoreticism, on the basis of which it is reconducted to the categories of a given cognitive field and thought in biological, psychological, sociological, economical terms, etc. (the reductionism of theoreticism, observes Bakhtin, is nothing less than «the inclusion of the large theoretical world within a small, also theoretical, world», p.13); or through the philosophies of life and their tendency toward a certain aestheticizing of life, amongst which Bakhtin considers the most important to be the philosophy of Bergson. Bakhtin's critique of the Bergsonian notion of «intuition» — the notion of empathy, participative cognition, which in art is directed toward the individual, through which one enters the interiority of an object to coincide with what is unique in it — anticipates his critique of the concept of «empathy» designed to play a central role in the Bakhtinian conception of the otherness relationship from «Author and Hero» through to his writings of the 1970s. The concept of identification, which remains fundamentally theoretical, despite its aestheticism, leads to the illusive belief of being able to overcome the extraneousness, «transgredient character» (an expression present in Bakhtin's subsequent writings of the early 1920s and which plays a central role in the delineation of the concept of extralocality), uniqueness, otherness of the situation as from which the act of

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identification comes about: the concept of identification, as identification with the other, involves, says Bakhtin, the loss of uniqueness of the unique place which I occupy in the world and presupposes therefore the assertion of the inessential character of my uniqueness and of the uniqueness of my place. Bakhtin makes a point of distinguishing between pure identification as a theoretical-aesthetic notion and «answerable act/deed of self-abstracting or self-renunciation» (p.16). Pure empathizing is delusive for in fact it cannot be achieved; if it were possible, it would involve the «impoverishment» of the relational situation, since «instead of two participants there would be one» (p.16), and because of the discontinuance of my unique being and therefore as my not-being, it would also be the annulment of my consciousness rather than a cognitive modality. On the contrary, in self-sacrifice the uniqueness of one's being in the world is fully achieved and the world in which, from one's own unique place, the act of self-sacrifice is chosen responsibly, is not at all the indifferent world of theoretical consciousness and of aesthetic intuition. Therefore nor can aesthetic identification give knowledge of the uniqueness of being in the world which is manifested in the taking of a stand, in answerable action. Rather, says Bakhtin,

The entire aesthetic world as a whole is but a moment of Being-as-event through an answerable consciousness — through an answerable deed by a participant (p.18).

If neither theoretical cognition, nor aesthetic intuition can absolve the task of possessing the unique event-ness of answerable action in the context of the uniqueness of being in the world, this is because both must fundamentally abstract from the place occupied by the observer, from his uniqueness as interpreter, from his otherness and also from his uniqueness, never-repeatability — otherness of what is observed following his reduction to the status of object. Contemporary philosophy has always drawn nearer to the ideal of scientificness, but precisely because of this it has become a philosophy of domains of culture and of their specific unity, and always less able to account for unitary and unique Being-as-event in life-action. According to Bakhtin, thanks to a contrast mechanism this explains the attraction exerted in the field of philosophy, in spite of their shortcomings, both by historical materialism with its
aim of leaving the more abstract theoretical world to build a world with room for the performance of deeds that are determinate, concretely historical and as active and answerable as possible, as well as philosophical conceptions that, recalling the Middle Ages or Oriental philosophies, place the question of wisdom at the center of their interests. As much as they are different and opposite, Bakhtin evidences the common methodological limit to both these philosophical tendencies due to the lack of discrimination of «what is given and what is set as a task, of what is and what ought to be» (p.20).

Bakhtin's assertion that theoretical reason and aesthetic reason are both part of practical reason should not lead us to believe that he was a follower of Kantianism. Moral philosophy or «first philosophy» as he sometimes calls it, which should concentrate on describing the Being-as-event as known by answerable action; the question of answerable action cannot avail itself of the Kantian conception or of the Neo-Kantian revival even if they do consider the moral problem to be particularly important. Bakhtin accuses the formal ethics of Kant and the Kantians of theoreticism, that is, of «abstracting from my unique self»: there is no approach to a living act performed in the real world (p.27).

The philosophy of the answerable act, says Bakhtin, can only be the phenomenology, the participative description, of this world of action, assuming it not as contemplated or theoretically thought out from the outside, but rather from the inside in its answerability. Though connected with Husserl's phenomenology, the approach just described is substantially different given that it proposes the otherness relationship centered on «moral answerability» as against the noesis-noema, subject-object relationship. From this point of view Bakhtin's attitude toward Husserl's phenomenology is similar to that adopted by Emmanuel Levinas⁶. The indifference of theoreticism is superseded by all that referred to by the unindifference of being participative in the world uniquely, never-repeatably and unreplaceably, by «my non-alibi in being». As regards this situation of unindifference — which does not ensue from a theoretical admission but which is the condition of my interest, desire, cognition, action, in which my uniqueness is simultaneously already given and actively set by myself, in which I am passive and active, determined and answerable — both dogmatism and generic hypotheticism; absolute determinism and the abstract conception of freedom as

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void possibility; objectivism and all forms of subjectivism and psychologism; void rationalism — in which logical clarity and abstract consequentiality have become detached from answerable consciousness and act as obscure and uncontrolled forces, and the irrationalism complementary to it, are all superseded: «rationality», says Bakhtin quoting Nietzsche, «is but a moment of answerability, a light that is "like the glimmer of a lamp before the sun"» (p.29). Language itself lives in relation to participative thought and to action, and the word which is not an abstract word from the dictionary, nor subjectively casual, becomes a live and «answerably-significant» word in relation to them. We already have clearly expressed considerations on language in this early paper which were to be developed in Bakhtin's subsequent books as well as in the two volumes by Voloshinov and in articles by the latter. It is in relation to the uniqueness of action that the word, says Bakhtin, manifests itself in its fullness, not only in terms of content-sense, but also as expression-image and from an emotional-volitional viewpoint as intonation. Unindifference deriving from the connection with answerable action orients words and makes possible the comprehension of objects, their living experience: to speak of an object means to enter an interested, unindifferent relationship with it, so that the uttered word cannot avoid being intonated. But all that is experienced is intonated and even the most abstract thought, insofar as it is concretely thought, has a volitional-emotional tone, and if an essential tie were not established between content and its emotional tone, which constitutes its actual value, a given word would not be uttered, a given thought would not be thought, a given object would not enter living experience.

In Bakhtin's view, the unindifference of answerable action establishes a connection between culture and life, between cultural consciousness and living consciousness. When this is not the case, cultural, cognitive, scientific, aesthetic, political values rise to the status of values-in-themselves and lose all possibility of verification, functionality, transformation. Bakhtin observes that this is part of a Hobbesian conception with clear political implications: to absolute cultural values there corresponds the conception according to which the people choose one time only, renouncing their freedom, surrendering themselves to the State after which they become slaves of their own free decision (cf. p.35). In his subsequent research Bakhtin was to amply demonstrate how all this contradicts constitutive
popular resistance to «State truth», the irreducibility of «non official ideology» to «official ideology», the character of popular culture, whose capacity for innovation and regeneration in relation to dominant culture was to be the object of study in Bakhtin's monograph on Rabelais. Insofar as it belongs to «class ideology», State truth, says Bakhtin in one of his subsequent annotations «From Notes Made in 1970-71», encounters at a certain point the unsurmountable barrier of irony and degrading allegory, the carnivalesque spark of allegorical-ironical imprecation which destroys all gravity and seriousness and never dies in the heart of the people. In a passage of «Toward a Philosophy of the Act», Bakhtin returns to the problem of the abdication of answerability, as political answerability, when he refers to political representation which in the attempt at relieving oneself of political answerability often loses — both in whoever attributes it and in whoever assumes it — the sense of one's roots in unique, personal non-alibi participation, and consequently becomes void, specialized and formal answerability, with all the danger that such loss of roots and of sense involves (cf. p.52).

In «Toward a Philosophy of the Act», Bakhtin refuses the concept of truth, inherited from rationalism, as formed of general, universal moments, as repetitive and constant and as separate and set against the individual and the subjective. Vice versa, as says Bakhtin, the unity of real consciousness acting answerably must not be thought in terms of continuity, at the level of content, of principles, rights, the law, and even less so of being: a clear standpoint against all forms of dogmatic absolutism, including the ontological. No being or value is identical or autonomous, a constant principle, separate from the live action of its identification as such and such being or value.

As regards the critique of ontology (extensible to Heidegger's ontology) as an important moment in the Bakhtinian refounding of «first philosophy» as «moral philosophy», particularly significant is the following passage from «Toward a Philosophy of the Act»:

Participation in the being-event of the world in its entirety does not coincide, from our point of view, with irresponsilbe self-surrender to Being, with being-possessed by Being. What happens in the latter case is that the passive moment in my participation is moved to the fore, while my to-be-accomplished self-activity is reduced. The aspiration of Nietzsche's

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philosophy reduces to a considerable extent to this possessedness by Being (one-sided participation); its ultimate result is the absurdity of contemporary Dionysianism (p.49).

My «non-alibi in being» involves my uniqueness and irreplaceability, it transforms void possibility in answerable real action, it confers actual validity and sense to all meanings and values which would otherwise be abstract, «it gives a face» to the event which is otherwise anonymous, it causes neither objective nor subjective reason to exist, but each one of us to be right in his/her own place and to be right not subjectively but answerably, without the possibility of this being interpreted as «contradiction» if not for a third, non incarnated, non participative consciousness and in the perspective of abstract, non-dialogic dialectics, which Bakhtin was to explicitly call into question in «From Notes Made in 1970-71». «Non-alibi in being» relates to the other and not in terms of indifference with a generic other, both as examples of mankind in general, but as concrete involvement, a relationship of unindifference with the life of one's neighbour, one's contemporary, with the past and future of real persons. An abstract truth referred to mankind in general, such as «man is mortal», acquires sense and value, says Bakhtin, only from my unique place, as the death of my neighbour, my own death, as the death of an entire community, or as the possibility of elimination of the whole of historically real humanity.

And, of course, the emotional-volitional, valuative sense of my death, of the death of an other who is dear to me, and the fact of any actual person's death are all profoundly different in each case, for all these are different moments in once-occurent Being-as-event. For a disembodied, detached (non-participating) subiectum, all deaths may be equal. No one, however, lives in a world in which all human beings are — with respect to value — equally mortal (p.48).

Bakhtin insists particularly on the inevitability of involvement with the other — with the concrete other, and not with an abstract other self, theoretistically conceived as abstract gnoseological consciousness — implied by being answerably participative in the world from the uniqueness of one's place: to be answerably participative is also apprehension for the other, who compels me answerably; answerability of the deed is above all answerability for the other,
and my uniqueness is the impossibility to abdicate such answerability, not being replaceable in it, to the point of abnegation, of self-sacrifice which my «answerable centrality» alone makes possible thereby becoming «sacrificed centrality».

One may also attempt to escape from this kind of non-alibi answerability, but even attempts at unburdening oneself testify to its weight and inevitable presence. All determinate roles, with their determinate, special answerability, do not abolish but simply specialize my personal answerablity, says Bakhtin, that is, my moral answerability without limits and guarantees, without an alibi. Detached from absolute answerability, special answerability loses sense, becomes casual, technical answerability, and having become mere representation of a role, action, technical performance, as «technical activity» it is de-realized and becomes illusion.

Bakhtin characterizes the contemporary crisis as the crisis of contemporary action which has become technical action, he identifies this crisis in the separation between action, with its concrete motivation, and its product which consequently loses sense. This interpretation is similar to Husserls's phenomenology especially as developed in «Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phдnomenologie» (published posthumously in 1954). But in Bakhtin, differently from Husserl where a certain theoreticism persists, sense is not conferred by the intentional consciousness, by the transcendental subject, but by answerable action expression of the uniquess of non-alibi in being in the world. For Bakhtin a philosophy of life can be only a moral philosophy. Furthermore, Bakhtin emphasizes how the separation between the product and the answerable act, between the technological-scientific apparatus and concrete motivation, between culture and life, not only involves a weakening of the product, a loss of sense in the cultural world become autonomous dominion, knowledge emptied of sense, but also degradation of the act itself which isolated from the meanings of culture, impoverished of its ideal moments, descends to a low degree of biological and economic motivation: outside objective culture it appears as bare biological subjectivity, an act-need. On considering this aspect, Bakhtin refers explicitly to Spengler, underlining his inability to reconduct theory and thought to action as necessary moments incorporated in the latter: rather he opposed the deed to theory and thought. The value placed by Bakhtin is that of unitary and unique answerable action as distinct

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from technical action with its special answerability (cf. p.56).

Moral philosophy must describe the «concrete architectonics» of the actual world of the performed act as a unitary and once-occurent act or deed, the basic emotional-volitional moments of its construction and their mutual disposition. The moments of such architectonics according to which all values, meanings and spatial-temporal relationships are constituted and arranged are characterized by Bakhtin in terms of otherness. They are: «I-for-myself, the other-for-me, and I-for-the-other» (p.54).

All the values of actual life and culture are arranged around the basic architectonic points of the actual world of the performed act or deed: scientific values; aesthetic values; political values (including both ethical and social values), and, finally, religious values (p.54).

In the part entitled «I» following the introduction to «Toward a Philosophy of the Act», Bakhtin, starting out from the unique place which each one of us occupies irreplaceably, concretely deals with the architectonics of the uniqueness and volitional-emotional unity of a world that is a non systematic but concretely-architectonic whole from an axiological, spatial-temporal viewpoint, arranged around a unique participative and unindifferent center, the center of value represented by each one of us in our non-alibi answerability. Such architectonics could not be understood if actualized by the same subject around which it is organized, if belonging to the same self and therefore to the discourse of the «confession» genre or of any other genre of direct discourse which as such is incapable of developing a global vision. Nor is comprehension possible from a cognitive point of view, which is neither emotionally nor evaluatively participative; which from an objective, indifferent point of view is incapable of comprehending what it describes and which would therefore end by impoverishing the latter and losing sight of the details which render it living and unfinalizable. Nor can it be based on empathy which would also be, if this were possible, an impoverishment insofar as it would reduce the relationship between two mutually external and non interchangeable positions to a single vision. According to Bakhtin interpretation-comprehension architectonics presupposes the other, both different and unindifferent, but reciprocally participative. Consequently there are two value-centers, myself
and the other, the two value-centers of life itself around which the architectonics of answerable action is organized and arranged. And these two centers of value must remain reciprocally other, the architectonic relationship among two others must remain from a spatial-temporal and axiological viewpoint, and the viewpoint of the I must not dominate. As an example of such a vision Bakhtin analyses the architectonics of art in «Toward a Philosophy of the Act», specifically verbal art, literature which is organized around the center of value represented by the single human being in its uniqueness, irreplaceability, precariousness and mortality. With respect to the latter, such expressions as earlier, later, as yet, when, never, late, already, it's necessary, ought to, beyond, farther, nearer, lose their abstract meaning, says Bakhtin, and are charged each time with a concrete sense with respect to the emotional-volitional situation of this participative center. Bakhtin develops and specifies such statements in «Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity»:

My own axiological relationship to myself is completely unproductive aesthetically: for myself, I am aesthetically unreal. (…). The organizing power in all aesthetic forms is the axiologcal category of the other, the relationship to the other, enriched by a axiological «excess» of seeing for the purpose of achieving a transgredient consummation⁷.

Bakhtin finds that the architectonics he intends to analyse with his moral philosophy or first philosophy is ready in literature: the otherness of the center of value of this architectonics considered from a transgredient, extralocalized point of view, and which in turn is unique and other. This is the author/hero relationship in the sphere of the literary text.

Each moment in an artistic work may be considered as a reaction of the author to a reaction of the hero toward an object, an event: reaction to a reaction. The relationship of the author, of art to life, is indirect, mediated by the hero. In life as well we encounter situations formed of reactions to reactions: but here the human being reacted to and his reaction are assumed in their objectivity, and the reaction to the reaction is also objective, it expresses a standpoint and is functional to a given context, a given aim. On the contrary, on an artistic plane the hero's reaction is represented and is no longer objective, but objectified, distanced from the author-man, it

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is his own reaction. The distinction between «objective» and «objectified» as well as that connected to it between «author man» and «author creator» play an important role in Bakhtin's conception and can in fact be traced throughout the whole of his production, from his early writings of the 1920s to those of the 1970s. The reaction to life, to the hero, is no longer provisional or functional to a practical or cognitive end insofar as it is objectified. A unitary reaction to the totality of the hero's world is essential to the artwork. This reaction is distinct from cognitive and practical reactions, though it is not indifferent to them; it gathers all the single cognitive and emotional-volitional reactions and unites them in an architectonic whole. For it to assume artistic value, the author's unitary action must evidence the resistance of reality, of life, which finds expression in the hero, the resistance of what is objective with respect to its picturing, to its objectification; the author's unitary action must evidence the hero's otherness and his extra-artistic values, it must therefore begin from a position of extralocality — in space, time and sense — as regards the hero, specially if autobiographical. Differently, as in the case of autobiography, the author's unitary action takes on confessional tones devoid of artistic value. In all this we already find clear signs of Bakhtin's critique of Russian formalism systematically developed in «The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship», published by Medvedev in 1928.

In the part entitled «I» of «Toward a Philosophy of the Act», Bakhtin analyses a poem by Pushkin, Razluka (Parting) in his effort to clarify the architectonic lay-out of the aesthetic vision. Subsequently he was to focus on the relationship between «author and hero in aesthetic activity» producing a long paper by the same title in which the first chapter, as mentioned above, begins with an analysis of the same poem, developing considerations which had already been made in the final part of the fragment at our disposal. This is particularly interesting to the end of understanding Bakhtin's research itinerary. We shall not stop to examine this part here (and refer readers to our comments made in the Italian edition of «Fragment from the first chapter of "Author and Hero"»⁸. Here, we simply wish to underline the fact that having identified an example of the type of architectonics he wished to analyse in the viewpoint of literature, Bakhtin ended by focussing on this viewpoint to the extent that what was only intended to be an example held his attention for the rest of his life.

Another important point is that Bakhtin initially approached the aesthetic vision through the lyrical genre where he originally identified the relationship of dialogic otherness among different points of view — in the case of Pushkin's poetry the dialogic dialectic between the author's context and that of the two protagonists, the author-hero and the heroin. This undermines both the mistaken interpretation which accuses Bakhtin of having been unattentive toward the lyric genre; as well of his conception of the degree of dialogicality relative to the diverse genres — and always present in the artistic word — interpreted as perspecting a rigid opposition among absolutely monological genres, such as lyric poetry, and dialogical genres, specially the novel in its «polyphonic» version (as identified by Bakhtin in the works of Dostoevsky).

Furthermore, through Bakhtin's demonstration that «first philosophy» or «moral philosophy» — whose foundations he researches into — is centered on the uniqueness and unreducible otherness of being, requiring not a direct, objective vision of the «I», of the subject, but an indirect and objectified vision where the viewpoint of «other» — as developed in literary writing — is central, we are better able to understand the sense of his proposal — as expressed in Dostoevsky — of «metalinguistics»: the living dynamic reality of language cannot be understood by studying the direct word or through linguistics that abstracts from the internal dialogicality of the concretely oriented and specifically intonated word. In «Toward a Philosophy of the Act» we find the premisses that were to guide Bakhtin throughout the whole of his research. As he demonstrates in a paper of 1952-53, «The Problem of Speech Genres», discourse genres may be divided into primary or simple genres, that is, the genres of everyday dialogue, and secondary or complex genres, that is, literary genres which represent and objectify everyday, ordinary, objective dialogical exchange. As a component of secondary genres, the dialogue of primary genres becomes represented dialogue thereby losing its direct link with the real context and with the aims of everyday life and, therefore, its instrumentality and functionality. The word leaves its monological context in which it is determined with respect to its object and the other words forming its context, and enters the context of the word that represents it, the complex verbal interaction with the author who objectifies and pictures it in the form of indirect, direct and free indirect discourse and their variants (discussed in part three of the Voloshinov volume of

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1929, «Marxism and the Philosophy of Language», now republished in a new Italian translation⁹). Bakhtin maintains that the complexity of dialogue may be studied through the represented word and its internal dialogization, present in the secondary discourse genres of literature — specially the novel, — which evidence aspects of dialogue not revealed by primary, simple, direct, objective discourse genres. Such a study is particularly interesting, as «The Problem of Speech Genres» maintains, when the object of analysis is the utterance considered as the cell of dialogic exchange, and not the sentence or proposition, the cell of the system of language (the latter being abstract concepts criticized by Bakhtin through his critique of «abstract objectivism» in language studies, conducted in the 1929 Voloshinov volume and in the latter's paper of 1928 on the tendencies in linguistic studies).

A one-sided orientation toward primary genres inevitably leads to a vulgarization of the entire problem (behaviorist linguistics is an extreme example). The very interrelations between primary and secondary genres and the process of the historical formation of the latter shed light on the nature of the utterance (and above all on the complex problem of the interrelations among language, ideology, and world view)¹⁰.

Bakhtin's text on the philosophy of the answerable act sheds light on the itinerary which led him to his 1929 monograph on Dostoevsky. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky's «philosophy» must not be identified in the specific conceptions and standpoints of the heroes in his novels or of specific contents. Rather, Bakhtin finds traces of the architectonics theorized in his paper on moral philosophy in the overall structure of Dostoevsky's works which he describes as being organized according to the principle of dialogicality, which is what Bakhtin was alluding to when he says, «to affirm someone else's "I" not as an object but as another subject — this is the principle governing Dostoevsky's worldview»¹¹. A statement which becomes clearer to us thanks also to a paper on Dostoevsky by Vjaceslav Ivanov. Dostoevsky's «polyphonic novel» describes the character no longer as an «I», as an object, but as a center that is «other» forming the perspective according to which his world is organized.

Dostoevsky carried out, as it were, a small-scale Coperni
can revolution when he took what had been a firm and finalizing authorial definition and turned it into an aspect of the hero's self-definition. (…) Not without reason does Dostoevsky force Makar Devushkin to read Gogol's «Overcoat» and to take it as a story about himself (…)

Devushkin had glimpsed himself in the image of the hero of «The Overcoat», which is to say, as something totally quantified, measured, and defined to the last detail: all of you is here, there is nothing more in you, and nothing more to be said about you. He felt himself to be hopelessly predetermined and finished off, as if he were already quite dead, yet at the same time he sensed the falseness of such an approach. (…)

The serious and deeper meaning of this revolt might be expressed this way: a living human being cannot be turned into the voiceless object of some secondhand, finalizing cognitive process. In a human being there is always something that only he himself can reveal; in a free act of self-consciousness and discourse; something that does not submit to an externalizing secondhand definition. (…)

The genuine life of the personality is made available only through a dialogic penetration of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself¹².

This is the itinerary followed by Bakhtin from his early works to publication in 1929 of his monograph on Dostoevsky: he begins with a project for refounding philosophy only to discover that the principles of his prolegomena to a philosophy of the answerable act were already active in literary writing. Here, depending on the literary genres or subgenres in question, the dimension of identity and of difference-indifference is surmounted and the architectonics of otherness from a participative and unindifferent point of view is delineated. This itinerary is also present in the work of the Bakhtin Circle as clearly emerges from a collection of writings edited by Ponzio, Jachia, De Michiel¹³; furthermore, thanks to Bakhtin's initial interest in the philosophy of answerable action, this research

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itinerary coherently develops into an interest in the philosophy of literature, where of literature is a subject genetive: not a philosophical vision to which literature must be subjected, but a philosophical vision which literature, verbal art, make possible.

If we now examine Bakhtin's last paper, «Toward a Methodology of the Human Sciences», written in 1974, we soon discover a surprising insistence on the same issue proposed at the beginning of his research. The material forming this paper was mainly written toward the end of the 1930s or beginning of the 1940s and returns to the problem of the impossibility of applying categories proper to the subject-object relationship to the human world. When dealing with human expression the criterion is neither the «exactness» of knowledge, nor philosophical «rigour», in the Husserlian sense, but the «profoundness of answering comprehension».

It is interesting that, after discussing dialogic-active comprehension as the highest level in sign comprehension, this paper of 1974 refers to an encyclopedic entry by S.S.Averincev — who collaborated with Bakhtin as well as editing his works — on the «symbol»¹⁴. With reference to the concept of «artistic symbol» as intended by Averincev, Bakhtin works on the connection with the image to which the symbol confers profoundness and perspective of sense. The symbol involves a «dialectic correlation between identity and non-identity». The symbol, adds Bakhtin citing Averincev, includes the warmth of mystery that unites, juxtaposition of one's own to the other, the warmth of love and the coldness of extraneousness, juxtaposition and comparison. Bakhtin insists that sense in the symbol image requires relatedness to another sense and interpretation not on the basis of its closest con-text, but rather on the basis of a remote context, a distant context, which opens identity to alterity. As is obvious, such considerations are strictly connected to Bakhtin's text on the philosophy of answering action.

In an essay entitled «Allegoria e metodo della conoscenza in Bachtin and in Benjamin. Due note e una parenesi»¹⁵, Luperini underlines a possible connection between the Bakhtinian concept of symbol and Ricoeur's, showing how it may be placed alongside the notion of «allegory» both as intended by the Bakhtin of other texts as well as in Benjamin's sense. Particularly interesting is Luperini's analysis — which begins with the concept of «symbol» as dealt with in Bakhtin's 1974 essay — of the essential features of the latter's concept of interpretation which, as we have seen, had already
been clearly delineated in «Toward a Philosophy of the Act»; his surpassing of traditional approaches of the subjectivistc and idealistic type and of the objectivistic and scientistic type; his distancing from positivistic, neo-positivistic, historicist positions and from dogmatic Marxism; his refusal of reducing interpretation to a mere encounter between two consciousnesses, to a fusion of horizons а la Gadamer, thereby annuling the distancing and reciprocal extralocality of texts in the historical continuum and in the linearity of tradition.

Translation from Italian by Susan Petrilli

¹ Bachtin e… Jachia P., Ponzio A. (ed.) Bari: Laterza, 1993.

² Bachtin e le sue maschere. Il percorso bachtiniano fino ai Problemi dell'opera di Dostoevskij (1919-1929). Jachia P., Ponzio A., De Michiel M. (ed.) Bari: Delalo, 1995, pp.43—100.

³ Cf.: Art and Answerability. Early Philosophical Essays by M.M.Bakhtin. Ed. by M.Holquist and V.Liapunov. Transl. and notes by V.Liapunov, suppl. transl. by K.Brostrom. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, pp.208—231.

⁴ This page and the following refer to the English translation of Bakhtin's «Toward a philosophy of the Act». Edited by M. Holquist and V. Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

⁵ Art and Answerability. Early Philosophical Essays by M.M.Bakhtin…, pp.1—2.

⁶ Cf.: Ponzio A.Tra semiotica e letteratura. Introduzione a Michail Bachtin. Milan: Bompiani, 1992; Ponzio A. Scrittura dialogo e alteritа. Tra Bachtin e Levinas. Florence: La nuova Italia, 1994; Ponzio A. Responsabilitа e alteritа in Emmanuel Levinas. Milan: Jaca Book, 1995, etc.

⁷ Art and Answerability. Early Philosophical Essays by M.M.Bakhtin…, pp.188—189.

⁸ Cf.: Bachtin e…

⁹ Bachtin e le sue maschere…

¹⁰ Bakhtin M. Speech Genres & Other Late Essays. Transl. by V. McGee, ed. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986, p.62.

¹¹ Bakhtin M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929). Transl.

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by C.Emerson (ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Minn., 1984, p.11.

¹² Ibid., pp.49—59.

¹³ Bachtin e le sue maschere…

¹⁴ Averincev S. «Simvol» // Kratkaja literaturnaja enciclopedija. Vol. VII. Moskva, 1971, coll. 826—831.

¹⁵ Luperini R. Allegoria e metodo della conoscenza in Bachtin and Benjamin. Due note e una parenesi // Bachtin e…, pp.43—56.

В статье исследуется философская эволюция М.М.Бахтина начиная с 1919 года и кончая годом издания книги о Достоевском (1929), а в некоторых аспектах — 1950-ми и даже 1970-ми гг. Автор статьи рассматривает концептуальную основу различных этапов этой эволюции и прослеживает их взаимосвязь и преемственность. По его мнению, «нравствен ная философия» Бахтина, отразившаяся в работах «Искусство и ответственность» и «К философии поступка», существенно отличалась от кантианства и неокантианст ва, а также от гуссерлианской феноменологии и бергсонов ского «интуитивизма». Пример участного и ответственного отношения к «другому» Бахтин увидел в архитектонике искусства и развил эту свою идею в работе «Автор и герой в эстетической деятельности», где философская структура «я_другой» предстала уже в виде эстетической — «автор_герой». Что до книги о Достоевском, то и в ней Бахтин продолжил изучение тех же морально-философских вопросов, которые были поставлены еще в трактате об ответствен ном поступке,— и прежде всего вопроса о взаимопроникно вении двух трансгредиентных, взаимно «других», но взаимно участных сторон человеческого бытия, обозначенных понятиями «я» и «ты» («автор» и «герой»). Таким образом, для Бахтина литература явилась не объектом для приложения философских концепций, а сферой, сделавшей возможными их реализацию и развитие.

ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Augusto Ponzio
From moral philosophy to philosophy of literature: Bakhtin from 1919 to 1929