J. Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol. 2, pp. 77-95 © 1992 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by licence only Buber and Bakhtin: Towards a Dialogical Theory of Language and Interpretation Steven Kepnes Colgate University! USA Mikhail Bakhtin [1895-1975]\ the increasingly influential Russian literary theorist and critic! was quoted in a recent edition of a popular New York publication as having once said that Martin Buber /lis the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century! and perhaps ... the sole philosopher on the scene .... I am very much indebted to him.n2 Given that Martin Buber has been disparaged in some intellec- tual circles as of late! these words of praise for Buber! uttered from the lips of so respected a literary figure as Bakhtin! were received with gladness by those who continue to be inspired by and write on Buber's work. Yet because there is no evidence that the two men knew one another and because Bakhtin refers to Buber only 1 This article is part of a book-length study of Buber's relevance to contemporary hermeneutics titled, The Text as Thou: Martin Buber's Dialogical Hermeneutics and Narrative Theology, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 1992. I am grateful to Nathan Scott Jr. for his discussion of Bakhtin in "The House of Intellect in an Age of Carnival: Some Hermeneutical Reflections, " Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 55,1 (Spring, 1987). I also benefitted from the fine reviews of Bakhtin's work by Giles Gunn in The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture (New York: Oxford, 1987), ch.6; Allon White, "Bakh- tin, Sociolinguistics and Deconstruction," in The Theory of Reading, ed. F. Gloversmith (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984); Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1984) and Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. W. Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984). This latter book includes English translations of a number of Russian texts not otherwise available and I quote from some of these translations. I also wish to express my thanks to Laurence Silberstein of Lehigh University for helpful comments he made when I gave a version of this paper at the Association for Jewish Studies, Boston, December 1989. 2 Joseph Frank, "The Voices of Mikhail Bakhtin," New York Review of Books XXXIII No.16 (Oct. 23, 1986), p.56,n.2. Frank quotes these remarks of Bakhtin from Mariya Kaganskaya, "Shutovskoi Khorovod," Sintaksis 12,1984, p.141. 77 78 Steven Kepnes briefly in his books3 and Buber does not refer to Bakhtin at all, 4 Bakhtin's remarks appear somewhat curious and have led to speculation as to why he made them.5 The most obvious connection between the two men can be found in their mutual respect for the importance of "dialogue." One could speculate that Bakhtin regarded Buber so highly because he provided him with a philosophy of dialogue that gave Bakhtin's theory of the centrality of dialogue to literature a philosophical justification. Yet having said this we have not said anything very interesting. We have circumscribed the two figures and placed them in separate realms, Buber in philosophy and Bakhtin in literature, and drawn a rather superficial connection between them. We will be able to make more profound connections between the two thinkers when we allow the distinction between philosophy and literature to be questioned and view the works of Bakhtin and Buber as addressing the same issue - the primacy of human dialogue to the lived-life of humanity and the struggle to express that dialogue in literary form. If it seems odd that Buber is placed alongside a literary critic and that it is suggested that Buber was keenly interested in matters of "literary expression and form" it may be because Buber's views on language, literature and interpretation have been either underem- phasized or overlooked by his major interpreters and critics. However, one need only turn to the first pages of Ich und Du which refer to "primary words" and to speech as the basis for the I-Thou relationship, to recognize the centrality of language in Buber's philosophy of dialogue. Beyond this one sees an abiding concern with matters of language and interpretation in Buber's biblical and 3 Bakhtin cites the anti-semitism of some of his friends as one reason he was reluctant to speak more about Buber and this may also be an unfortunate reason why he wrote so little about Buber. See Frank, Ibid. and Kaganskaya, Ibid.. 4 Maurice Friedman has informed me that Buber would have to have been aware of the work of Bakhtin when he read and commented on the 1963 edition of Friedman's, Problematic Rebel. In this book Friedman uses Bakhtin in his discussion of Dostoyevsky. 5 In her recent article on Buber and Bakhtin, Nina Perlina gives evidence to suggest that "Bakhtin was familiar with the early writings of Buber." Perlina mentions specifically Buber's, Daniel, (Leipzig: Insel, 1913); Reden iiber das Judentum, (Frankfurt o. M.: Rutten und Loening, 1923); and Ich und Du, (Leipzig: Insel, 1923). Perlina, "Mikhail Bakhtin and Martin Buber: Problems of Dialogic Imagination," Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 9,1 (Fall, 1984), p.26 no.4., d. "Introduction," in M.M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva [The Aesthetics of Verbal Art] (Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1979) for a discussion of Buber's influence on Bakhtin. Perlina's article came to my attention after I wrote this paper. Our two different analyses complement each other nicely. Each uses different textual warrants to illustrate the striking similarities between Buber and Bakhtin..