Participative Autonomy. Concerning Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogism

Abstract

The article deals with, mostly, three interconnected issues. First, an attempt is made to come to terms with a certain reaction against the overwhelming interest in dialogue in general and Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue in particular, after the end of the modern times, or modernity, both in Russia and in the West. Sec­ondly, the social-cultural situation in the 21st century, it seems, provides an op­portunity to pose anew and in a new way the old question in the Bakhtinian stud­ies: “Where did Bakhtin come from?” with the primary stress on Bakhtin’s philosophical origins. Thirdly, the new interest, in contemporary Bakhtinian crit­icism, in his early (programmatic) texts between 1919 and 1924, seems, to per­ceive more productively Bakhtin’s idea of dialogue and dialogism with the help of some earlier terms, particularly his concept of “participative autonomy” taken in the double perspective: from the point of view of the inner unity of Bakhtin’s authority, on one hand, as well as from the point of view of the circumstances his project of “participatory thinking” itself participated in the turn to the “new thinking” in the 1920s. In this event of the radical transformation of the tradition of the “first philosophy” (mostly in the West), the Russian thinker, in fact, took part both participatively and originally, in the sphere of “in-between”, i.e. among his contemporaries.