Michael Bachtin

May 23, 2002, Moscow, 9.00

Michael Bachtin (1895 - 1975) is certainly a figure of the less importance that Nickolay Berdyaev. He is popular among Russian (and German) culturologists and philosophers. His life is a brilliant example of his own philosophy: B's main idea is that life is a sort of dialogue. But he lived his life in the Communist country where no dialogue was possible.

He was imprisoned, lost his hand in the concentration camp and died in exile. His books appeared only in 1960-s and later. What is much worse, he was obliged to express his philosophy in the terms or rhetoric, linguistics and culturology. Thus, his main idea about life as an instant communication between people and inside one's own soul was expressed in the book about Dostoyevsky's novels.

Bachtin was a positivist, he never wrote about religion (above all, it was impossible,) and an least partially he was close to Marxism or, better to say, to the German philosophy of life.

His another great book was dedicated to Rabelais; again, he wrote actually about dialogue as an essence of the social life. He analyzed carnival, all these Rabelaisian's punches and jokes, and promoted the idea that totalitarian (or medieval, or archaic) society can exist as long as it gives its members a time of a rest from rigidness and oppression. Carnival is such a time: you can do everything, or, better to say, you can behave like a king or like a swine, and king behave like you. Ups and downs change their positions. The world becomes topsy-turvy.

This conception bears some signs of Marxist perception of society as a mechanism, it is close to Freudian idea of Ego and Superego, of sex as expression of those parts of personality which are repressed by society. The method of Bachtin is very close to the French school of "Annales" of 1940-50-s (Marc Bloc etc.). He analyze not economy but collective psychology. Still, he still remains the philosopher and instantly makes brilliant although short digressions about human. For Bachtin society is only a metaphor of human, for Marx human is only a metaphor of society.

Bachtin's name in English is usually spelled as Mihail Bahtin, and "Michael Bachtin" is common German transliteration.

Bachtin is very popular in Germany, I think, because his method of philosophical reflection on linguistic material is very close to Heidegger's and Hadamer's. I think that this the the most weak feature of all these thinkers. Certainly, XX c. was most fruitful in linguistics, this is a part of the industrial revolution, when written text and communication (not plough and land) become basic productive tools and a source of income and life. Still, there is some very definite deafness of linguistic philosophers to metaphysics, to religion. They address the Word as a Savior, the Word is the only Mediator to them, but they avoid the word "Savior" or "Salvation."

Certainly, this is not so much the fault of this or that person as the fault of the secularist society, which agree to see Salvation everywhere except Christianity. Bachtin in Russia created a sort of secular revival of spirituality. But he also shared the fate of all revivals: now he is popular mostly among the narrow circle of those culturologists who try to remain positivists and at the same time to keep some metaphysical air in their lungs.