Bakhtinian answerability and Levinasian responsibility: Forging a fuller dialogical communicative ethics

Abstract

This essay seeks to contribute to our understanding of the dialogical nature of human existence and the ethics of communication by examining the inner structure of the relationship between self and Other. It suggests that the combination of Emmanuel Levinas's notion of the call to responsibility and Mikhail Bakhtin's notions of dialogism and answerability provides a more complete account of human dialogue and the ethical dimension of the communicative encounter. It does so by theorizing the respective functions of self and Other within the interhuman dialogue. As an extension of dialogical ethics, the synthesis of Bakhtin and Levinas demonstrates that ethics is itself a dialogical phenomenon. Ethics is a conversation between one's own‐most answerability and the calls to responsibility of Others.