Para uma filosofia do ato responsável

by Mikhail Bakhtin, Valdemir Miotello (translator), Carlos Alberto Faraco (Translator)

"Para uma filosofia do ato responsável" foi escrito em meados da década de 1920. Permaneceu inacabado e sem título até ser publicado em 1986 com o nome russo de "K filosofii postupka". Na edição inglesa ganhou o título de "Toward a philosophy of the act".

A organização é do Grupo de Estudos dos Gêneros do Discurso (GEGE) juntamente com o professor da Universidade de Bari, na Itália, Augusto Ponzio. A apresentação introdutória foi feita por Augusto Ponzio exclusivamente para a edição brasileira, bem como o prólogo, escrito pelo professor Carlos Alberto Faraco, da Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR).

Um termo chave em todo trabalho de Bakhtin é edinstvennji, singular, irrepetível, excepcional, incomparável, sui generis.

Diferentemente da direção tomada pela modernidade, que construiu um indivíduo egoísta, a construção da unicidade singular em Bakhtin exige a alteridade e o compromisso com o outro; uma singularidade em ligação com a vida do universo inteiro, que inclui na sua finitude o sentido do infinito.

É possível conhecer o singular? Que compromissos é possível assumir desde o lugar único que cada ser ocupa? Estas questões são centrais neste trabalho, e tocam diretamente a vida de cada um, afirmando a diferença singular, e um compromisso ético sem-álibi algum.

Quando Para uma filosofia do ato responsável, escrito no início da década de 1920, veio a público pela primeira vez, em 1986, causou certa perplexidade entre os leitores de Bakhtin: a linguagem ocupava lugar pequeno no texto, a grande metáfora do diálogo não era mencionada, não havia igualmente qualquer referência ao riso e à cultura carnavalesca e o único exemplo do texto era um poema lírico que, segundo o entendimento de alguns, era um gênero desprezado por Bakhtin.

Aparentemente, era um outro Bakhtin o autor do texto. Era um filósofo que se mostrava; e não o crítico da literatura e da cultura, o estudioso de Dostoiévski e Rabelais ou o teórico do romance com quem seus leitores estavam acostumados.

O avançar das leituras e releituras e o trabalho de vários autores mostraram os vínculos estreitos de Por uma Filosofia do Ato Responsável com os outros textos de Bakhtin. Houve, sem dúvida, desdobramentos e refinamentos do conceitual bakhtiniano ao longo das cinco décadas de sua produção. Por uma Filosofia do ato responsável contém (em gérmen, é verdade, considerando seu caráter de rascunho fragmentário) as coordenadas que sustentarão boa parte do edifício posterior: a eventicidade (o irrepetível), o sempre inconcluso (o que está sempre por ser alcançado), o antirracionalismo (o antissistêmico), o agir (o interagir) e, acima de tudo, o axiológico (o vínculo valorativo).

LIVRO EM SEGUNDA EDIÇÃO. Tradução do texto em italiano, e feita sob os cuidados de Valdemir Miotello e Carlos Alberto Faraco.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Literature, Literary Criticism

159 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Very influential writings of Russian linguist and literary critic Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in 20th-century poststructuralism and the social theory of the novel included Problems of Dostoyevsky's Works (1929, see Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky) and The Dialogic Imagination (1975).

This philosopher, semiotician, and scholar on ethics and the philosophy of language. He on a variety of subjects inspired scholars in a number of different traditions of Marxism, semiotics, and religionand in disciplines as diverse as history, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology. Although Bakhtin acted in the debates on aesthetics that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, scholars rediscovered his not well known distinctive position in the 1960s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail...

Reviews

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my favorite of all of Bakhtin's books.

In it, he makes the case for why we are wholly dignified beings who must live with one another, listening to each other as equals.

What is more important than that?

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

A jargon-laden prolegomena on the need to tie Kantianism to a phenomenology of action. Don’t miss the rejection of determinate/autonomous ethical norms.

[Jenell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reimagining, revolution, and resistance in name of and for the sake of humanity and love. My kind of shit.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5 stars, rounded down)

This dense little fragment has revitalized my interest in Bakhtin after reading The Dialogic Imagination with great interest almost twenty years ago, and then having that enthusiasm blunted through my exposure to its appropriation within the domain of cultural studies. What a happy discovery to learn then, through this early work, the extent to which Bakhtin had been working through the German philosophic tradition while consciously positioning himself in relation to contemporaneous orientations such as Neo-Kantiansim and phenomenology.

In attempting to "go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative," Bakhtin criticizes in certain ways that are reminiscent of Heidegger the sterility of theoretical generalities over the unique, lived experience of the individual, which is always informed by a participation within a social context. The development of Bakhtin's ontology is characteristic of the originality of his particular genius, but its orientation is actively engaged in the seed bed of philosophical crosscurrents of early 20th Century Germany, an intellectual ferment that produced modern existentialism, philosophical hermeneutics, and phenomenology, and that adds an entirely new and exciting aspect to his portfolio, from this reader's perspective.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Philosophy of the Act is not well written, but the manuscript was never intended to be published by Bakhtin to begin with. There are thoroughly engaging ideas in this text though. I am most drawn towards Bakhtin’s critiques of philosophical theory, especially of Kant, as well as his explorations of space, time, and action in this manuscript.

[Reuben Woolley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This shows you the inner workings of a lot of his later thought. It’s incredibly dense and steeped in impossible kantian terminology, and it’s really not helped by being an incomplete fragment of a water-damaged manuscript (several moments where you think you’re finally understanding something and he hits you with a “[32 illegible words]”) but there’s some really interesting stuff in here for the Bakhtin stans out there

[a.h. · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finished Mikhail Bakhtin’s TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT, an unpublished text written between 1919 and 1921 and rediscovered, rat and water-damaged, by his students in 1972. The foreword begins, “In his long life under Soviet rule, Bakhtin experienced the whole range of effects an author can produce, from censorship, imprisonment, and banishment to fame and adulation.” I found out about this short but difficult book from Russian literary scholar, Gary Morson, in his discussion of Bakhtin’s concept, “non-alibi,” which means “One is…always responsible for what one does or fails to do in an unrepeatable moment of time” (WONDER CONFRONTS CERTAINTY, p. 259). Bakhtin alludes to this lack of political accountability in a brief statement on technology, that “when divorced from the once-occurrent unity of life…it may from time to time irrupt…as an irresponsibly destructive and terrifying force” (p. 7). The book as a whole is a complex discussion of the centrality of one’s human existence and living experience from and through which we derive all thoughts and actions. This may seem obvious. But Bakhtin objects to abstract ideas or “Theory” divorced from human responsibility. In historical terms, for example, it is communist “theory” as an “alibi” that allows starvation and murder of millions of people. For Bakhtin scholars, TOWARD A PHILOSOPHY is essential reading. I’m not one of them. But since he is one of the more important literary philosophers of the 20th century, I will eventually get to his THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION (1941) and SPEECH GENRES (1971). The latter pages of PHILOSOPHY OF THE ACT explicate the aesthetic perspectives in Pushkin’s poem, “Parting” (1830), precursing Bakhtin's later works.

[Jordan Goings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Revolutionary for both its time, as well as our own. Discusses how we implement the artistic/theoretical tastes of our lives into the practical. Kind of heady and difficult to follow... but that's expected, given he wrote it around the age of 20. A fine work for Christian epistemology and aesthetics.

[sologdin · Rating 1 out of 5]

unfinished and probably unfinishable, but not in a good nezavershennost way. could've been some cool neo-Kantian rumination here on the key problem of vnenakhodimost, had dude not smoked this manuscript up in the Kazakh wilderness (or was that the other text?).

[Ammon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Volitional and architectonic.