Bakhtin and Bergson: Dialogue on the Pages of the Fifth Volume of the French Thinker’s Works (Bakhtin’s Marks in the Work “Introduction to Metaphysics”)

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of M.M. Bakhtin’s perception of the ideas and texts of A. Bergson, whose name is associated with the process of changing the cultural philosophy of not only Europe, but also Russia in the first third of the XX century. Emphasizing the initial dissimilarity between the philosophi­cal positions of the younger neo-Kantian Bakhtin and the intuitionist Bergson, the authors believe that the French philosopher’s ideas were reflected not only in Bakhtin’s early texts, where they are the subject of polemics and criticism,
but also in his later work: Bergson is among the implicit opponents and partici­pants in the great philosophical dialog that continued in Bakhtin’s mind through­out his life. As a concrete form of Bakhtin’s dialog with Bergson, the article con­siders Bakhtin’s notes on the pages of the fifth volume of the French thinker’s collected works. Based on Bakhtin’s idea of the dialogical character of reading, the authors conduct a consistent analysis of Bakhtin’s notes, pay special attention to footnotes and comments, and identify the correlation of passages in Bergson’s text with Bakhtin’s fragments, sketches, and notes of the 1940s and early 1950s. Due to the considerable volume of material, the study is divided into two parts. The first is devoted to the analysis of Bakhtin’s marks on the pages of “Introduc­tion to Metaphysics”, the second – to marginalia in the works “Psychophysical Parallelism and Positive Metaphysics” and “Laughter”. The archival material presented in the article is introduced into the scientific turnover for the first time.