Communication with the Other and Moral Answerability in Mikhail M. Bakhtin

Abstract

When Bakhtin must qualify himself he calls himself a ‘philosopher’ and when he must name his research he calls it ‘philosophy of language.’ Bakhtin practices what we may call ‘philosophy of otherness’ which produces a real and proper revolution—the Bakhtinian revolution as recites the title of one of my monographs on Bakhtin—which consists in placing the other instead of the I at the centre of his thought system. Bakhtin says that in aesthetic terms the I is entirely unproductive, just as it is unproductive when a question of constructing a philosophy of responsible action, a philosophy of language free from the “langue”-“parole” dichotomy and from subjectivistic interpretations of speech in terms of “expression:” philosophy of language according to Bakhtin turns its attention to the word of the other, and is delineated in terms of the “art of listening.”