Toward a Philosophy of the Act

by Mikhail Bakhtin, Vadim Liapunov (Contributor), Michael Holquist (Editor)

Rescued in 1972 from a storeroom in which rats and seeping water had severely damaged the fifty-year-old manuscript, this text is the earliest major work (1919-1921) of the great Russian philosopher M. M. Bakhtin. Toward a Philosophy of the Act contains the first occurrences of themes that occupied Bakhtin throughout his long career. The topics of authoring, responsibility, self and other, the moral significance of "outsideness," participatory thinking, the implications for the individual subject of having "no-alibi in existence," the difference between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse—all are broached here in the heat of discovery. This is the "heart of the heart" of Bakhtin, the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, "the given" and "the created" that forms the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism. A special feature of this work is Bakhtin's struggle with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Put very simply, this text is an attempt to go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative. mci will be important for scholars across the humanities as they grapple with the increasingly vexed relationship between aesthetics and ethics.

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

132 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.