Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 9-17-2012 12:00 AM In the Fullness of Time: M. M. Bakhtin, In Discourse and in Life James C. Hall The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Dr. Michael Gardiner The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Master of Arts © James C. Hall 2012 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Continental Philosophy Commons, Esthetics Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, and the History of Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Hall, James C., "In the Fullness of Time: M. M. Bakhtin, In Discourse and in Life" (2012). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 885. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/885 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. In the Fullness of Time: M. M. Bakhtin, In Discourse and in Life (Spine title: M. M. Bakhtin: In Discourse and in Life) (Thesis format: monograph) By James C. Hall The Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada © James C. Hall 2012 THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO SCHOOL OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION Supervisor Examiners ______________________________ ______________________________ Dr. Michael Gardiner Dr. Antonio Calcagno ______________________________ Dr. Carole Farber ______________________________ Dr. Joel Faflak The thesis by James C. Hall entitled: In the Fullness of Time: M. M. Bakhtin, In Discourse and in Life is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Date__________________________ _______________________________ Chair of the Thesis Examination Board ii ABSTRACT: The phrase “the fullness of time” touches upon one of M. M. Bakhtin’s most consistently upheld tenets; for Bakhtin, philosophical and everyday utterances rely on their historical embeddedness for the material and concrete reality from which they draw their meaning and through which they are conditioned, inflected, and re-evaluated. In his very last work Bakhtin stated that all meanings are in continuous evolution. In this thesis the attempt is made to interpret Bakhtin’s corpus by concentrating particularly on the movement of historical and philosophical becoming, the art of responding to philosophy and the events of everyday life, and the particular mutual inter-relatedness of the disciplines of ethics, aesthetics, biology, psychology, psychoanalysis, and linguistics as these discourses are taken up in Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle’s writings. Key words: Answerability, Architectonics, Authorship, Bakhtin, Chronotopicity, Dialogue, Discourse, Freud, History, Voloshinov. iii A work of literature... is revealed primarily in the differentiated unity of culture of the epoch in which it is created, but it cannot be closed off in this epoch: its fullness is revealed only in great time . —Bakhtin, Speech Genres , p. 5. iv For my parents... v Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Dr. Michael Gardiner for his patience and profound kindness during the composition of this work. Without his insight and expertise, I could not have made this beginning into the headwaters of Bakhtinian literature. Dr. G., I look forward to a continuing dialogue with you in the years to come. Dr. Antonio Calcagno helped me to get settled both at CSTC and in Husserl’s writings. Thank you, Tony ... Forza! I would also like to thank my committee members Dr. Joel Faflak and Dr. Carole Farber who continue to give of their time and energy to CSTC and the larger community at Western, and without whom nascent works like this would never be read or critiqued. There are many proper names on the periphery of this text, whose voices I often heard during its composition, and who continue to teach me from a distance. Among these are Joseph Siddiqi, Dr. Susan Songsuk Hahn, Dr. Jakub Zdebik, Dr. David N. Wright, Dr. Bina Toledo Freiwald, and Dr. Jonathan Sachs, each of whom was influential in my undergraduate work and helped make viable my sojourn out of Montréal to CSTC. I’d like to thank Dr. Veronica Schild for perceiving very early that Michael Gardiner and Antonio Calcagno would lend the necessary direction to my studies at CSTC. To Dr. Tilottama Rajan, thank you for seeing in me the seed of something to come. I look forward to our continuing conversation. Dr. Peter Schwenger, thank you for your inexhaustible passion for the arts. Dr. Damjana Bratuž, thank you for showing me how to actively listen in dialogue with Bartók—maybe someday I’ll actually have an ear for it! Melanie Cladwell Clark, thank you for being a gravitational centre at CSTC, without you it all flies apart. My colleagues Will Samson and Siobhan Waters I trust with my sanity, as they let me know when I walk too close to the edge. Thanks. This work could not have gotten off the ground at all without the help and untiring support of Susannah Mulvale. She has remained a friend and colleague through years of feast and famine. Thanks for everything, Sus, and not least of all for Katze. My parents, Marilyn and Cyril Hall gave me life and then allowed me the freedom to pursue a path of my own choosing. The two of you know better than anyone else what this means to me. Thanks Mom and Dad. Finally, a warm thank you to my unofficial mentor, Dr. Dennis O’Connor, who found me a seedling in need of watering—who first sowed in this parched soil the idea that there is a difference between being and having, and that this difference is not without its own ambiguity. You will likely never know the extent to which your influence at a distance teaches me daily... but I always try to remember to say thanks! vi Table of contents for In the Fullness of Time: M. M. Bakhtin, In Discourse and in Life Certificate of Examination ................................................................................................ii Abstract ..............................................................................................................................iii Epigraph ............................................................................................................................iv Dedication ...........................................................................................................................v Acknowledgements ...........................................................................................................vi Table of Contents .............................................................................................................vii Introduction ........................................................................................................................1 A. The Vertigo of History ...............................................................................1 B. Outline of the Whole ................................................................................10 § 1. Biography: M. M. Bakhtin ..................................................................................15 A Novel Education: Bakhtin’s Bildungsroman in Brief........................................15 § 2. Ethics: Toward a Philosophy of the Act and Art and Answerability ..................21 2.1 Lost in Translation?: Bakhtin Meets the West.......................................................21 2.2 Christ or Marx?: How to Read Bakhtin’s Ethical Writings...................................24 2.3 Beyond Orthodoxy: Kenosis and an Ethics of the Event......................................26 2.4 I and I: A Genealogy of Ethics..............................................................................40 2.5 In the Flesh: Slovo , or the Word as Deed..............................................................43 § 3. Biology: Bakhtin, Kanaëv, and “Contemporary Vitalism” .............................49 3.1 A Brief History of “Contemporary Vitalism”: Contextualizing the Kanaëv Paper.........................................................................49 3.2 Bakhtin and Kanaëv’s Critique of “Contemporary Vitalism”...............................54 3.3 Biology and Dialectical Materialism......................................................................59 3.4 Introducing the Soma, Instincts, and the Pleasure Principle into Psychoanalysis........................................................................................................64 3.5 Freudian Appropriations of Biological Theory and Praxis: Beyond the Pleasure Principle ...............................................................................71 vii § 4. Psychology and Psychoanalysis: Freudianism : A Marxist Critique .................80 4.1 Between Marxism and ‘Freudianism’: Valentin Voloshinov & Psychoanalysis................................................................80 4.2 Freudianism : A Marxist Critique ..........................................................................84 4.3 Extending the Bakhtin Circle’s Critique of Psychoanalysis.................................92 § 5. Discourse: A Critique of Saussurean Linguistics ...........................................102