10.3726/78000_121 Philology and Philosophy in Mikhail Bakhtin Augusto Ponzio Università di Bari Abtsract Two declarations by Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1973 conversations with Duvakin: that he is an unofficial person; and a philosopher more than a philologist. The first express- es the desire to escape forms of representation, formal, technical, specialized attitudes, denounced as “imposture”. The second, connected to it, concerns his choice not to remain inside the philologist’s world, in the specialism of a discipline despite how he had known and practiced it during his studies, a wide-ranging approach which included literary histo- ry, literary criticism, modern and ancient languages, classical literatures, study of popular literature and folklore, comparative linguistics, general linguistics, aesthetics, philosophy. For Bakhtin all this “knowhow” is connected with life, with individual responsibility, “non-alibi in existing”, expressed with the central concept “chronotope”: to connect two chronotopes, foster dialogue between them: that of verbal art and of life. His choice: an “unofficial” philosopher evading all forms of theoreticism to construct a “philosophy of singularity”, supported by knowledge as a “philologist”, which too makes him the great Bakhtin. Keywords Philology, Philosophy, Discourse genres, Chronotope, Responsibility-without- alibis 1. Two Declarations by Mikhail Bakhtin, by Way of a Premise 1.1 An unofficial person I will begin with two declarations made by Mikhail Bakhtin in his conver- sations of 1973 (in Bakhtin 1996, second edition 2002, It. trans. Mikhail Bakhtin, In dialogo, 2008) with Viktor Duvakin (1899–1982, a Majakovskij expert). After teaching literature for over forties years at the university of Moscow, Duvakin spent the last fifteen years of his life recording memories about Russian culture in the early twentieth century. The first declaration made by Bakhtin in his 1973 conversations ßwith Victor Duvakin (1996, It. trans., p. 347) concerns Marija Judina © Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 121–150 122 Augusto Ponzio (1899–1970). She too was a member of the so-called “Bakhtin circle”, at the time “philosophical circle”, from the time it was inaugurated in Nevel’ in 1918: “Marija Veniaminovna Judina as person was absolutely unofficial. Anything official was a burden for her. The same for me. I can’t bear the official either”. Bakhtin, an unofficial person: with respect to official, public circles, he was from another circle, one tending towards unofficialness, even be- fore his arrest and conviction. Thanks to this attitude he was able to pro- ceed in his intellectual travels in spite of long years of total exclusion from the culture of his time, always thinking and writing. Mikhail Mikhajlovic Bakhtin was born on 17th November (4th ac- cording to the Julian calendar) 1895 in Orël. He belongs to the same generation as the semiotician Roman Jakobson (1896), the ethnologist Vladimir Propp (1895), the formalist Victor Sklovskij (1893), the psy- chologist Lev Vygotskij. After long years spent in exile for having col- laborated with the religious-philosophical association founded by Alek- sandr Mejer, he died in Moscow in 1975, the year his first collection of writings was published, followed by another in 1979. During his lifetime, after publication of his monograph on Dostoevsky in 1929, banished from official culture during the Stalinist period, he published a second amplified edition of this work in 1963, followed by his monograph on Rabelais in 1965. Bakhtin carried out his university studies in Odessa and Petrograd where Veselovskij, Baudouin de Courtenay and Zelinskij taught their cours- es. On shifting to Vitebsk in 1920, Bakhtin met Pavel N. Medvedev (born in 1891, executed in 1938) and Valentin N. Vološinov (1885–1936). They became friends and collaborated closely, forming a circle which after Bakh- tin’s death was denominated the “Bakhtin circle”. Other members included the pianist Marija Judina, the musicologist Sollertiskij, the biologist Kanaev, the writer Vaginov, the indiologist Tubjanskij, the poet Kljuev. 1.2 From philology to philosophy The second declaration made by Bakhtin in his 1973 conversations with Victor Duvakin (1996, It. trans., p. 347) concerns the relation in his work between philology and philosophy: © Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 121–150 Philology and Philosophy in Mikhail Bakhtin 123 Duvakin: But weren’t you also a classicist? Bakhtin: I was… I was a philosopher. What I’d say is… D: Were you more of a philosopher than a philologist? B: Philosopher more than philologist. Philosopher: and that’s what I am still today. I’m a philosopher. I’m a thinker. Well then, let me see, in Peters- burgh, Petrograd, as in Odessa, there was no philosophy department. All the same, there they would ask “what is philosophy?”, and the answer was, “neither fish nor fowl”. There was no specialization that could re- spond adequately. Of course, there was a department where philosophy was taught, but not an independent department. You want to finish your studies and continue in philosophy? Fine, but you are obliged to finish them in something like a Department of Russian studies, or German studies… D: And do so in the historical-philological area? B: In the historical-philological area … that is, the classical section. Let’s say I decided for the classical… A diploma was possible in the two depart- ments, because the philosophical section in itself did not offer… D: Did not offer the possibility of having a profession. B: … it didn’t give a profession. D: In general that’s fair enough. B. Yes, I believe so. After all, what is a philosopher? … Generally, let’s say, philosophers are distinguished as humanist philosophers and philosophers of nature: the latter are specialized in natural sciences, physics, mathemat- ics, in addition to philosophy; the former in the human sciences (Bakhtin, 1996, It. trans., p. 120). The orientation chosen by Bakhtin was historical-philological: in Petrograd he continued his studies at the historical-philological faculty, but in the de- partment of classical studies (Ibid. p. 122). At the University of Odessa and in Petrograd (St. Petersburgh) his pro- fessors for European linguistics and classical studies were, among others, Aleksandr Tomson, who studied with Filipp Fortunatov, and author of Intro- duction to linguistics, and Faddej Zelinskij. For philosophy Nikolaj Lange, who followed Wundt, and Aleksandr Vvedenskij, a scholar of logic, “a rig- orous Kantian, but not neo-Kantian” (Ibid., p. 135–136). During the same conversation, Bakhtin premised that: I’ve had a very valuable formation and education, no doubt. But I have to say this: though I can’t complain about gymnasium or university, fundamentally my education comes from my own readings. Everything and always. Because, in reality, scholastic and official institutions can’t give an education that is fully satisfactory. When you limit yourself to this, essentially you become … an knowledge official. You only learn about the preceding phase of a discipline, but as to the contemporary situation, the © Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 121–150 124 Augusto Ponzio creative …, in my opinion initiation comes about by reading the most recent literature, the most recent books independently. (Ibid., p. 113) So then, what does Bakhtin mean when he says, “Philosopher more than philologist. Philosopher: and that’s what I am still today. I’m a philosopher”. As he clarifies throughout his writings (see “The Problem of Text”, 1959–61, in Bakhtin, 1986a, pp. 103–104), through to the last two from the early 1970s (“Response to a Question from the Novij Mir Editorial Staff, 1971, and “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences”, 1974, respec- tively in Ibid., pp. 1–9, and 159–171), philosophy for Bakhtin is a study on the points of contact and interaction among different disciplines and as such cannot be described as linguistic, philological, literary, sociological, or semiotic, and so forth. For Bakhtin philosophy means not to accept restriction to the bound- aries of a discipline, nor to the sphere of “general ontology”, to evoke Edmund Husserl, the already given world, the being of things, being as it presents itself in today’s world, in contemporaneity. Bakhtin also indi- cates this movement beyond, this search for the otherwise, this encroach- ment with the particle “meta”: in fact, in the second edition of his book on Dostoevsky, given that his research cannot be contained within clas- sifications established by studies in linguistics and philology, he tags it “metalinguistics”. 2. A Constant Idea: the Notion of Chronotope In “Notes Made in 1970–71”, Bakhtin outlines an introduction that antici- pates a collection of his writings from various phases in his research. He was working on this collection (Voprosy literatury i estetiki, 1975) just before his death: This collection of my essays is unified by one theme in the various stages of its development. The unity of the emerging (developing) idea. […] in these works there is much external open-endedness, that is, an open-endedness not of the thought itself but of its expres- sion and exposition. Sometimes it is difficult to separate one open-endedness from another. My love for variations and for a diversity of terms for a single phenomenon. © Peter Lang AG Philology, vol. 1/2015, pp. 121–150 Philology and Philosophy in Mikhail Bakhtin 125 The multiplicity of focuses. Bringing distant things closer without indicating the inter- mediate links. (Bakhtin, 1979, Eng. trans., p. 155) In Bakhtin’s works “the theme in the various stages of its development”, “the emerging idea” is the notion of chronotope. This idea is already present in Bakhtin’s text from the early 1920s, “K filosofii postupka” (1920–24, in Russian and Italian in Bachtin e il suo Circolo 2014), where he introduces the notion of exotopy (vnenakodimost’). In this text he also introduces the no- tion of “architectonics” where all values, meanings and spatial-temporal re- lationships are characterized in terms of otherness: “I-for-myself, the other- for-me, and I-for-the-other” (Bakhtin 1993, p.