Bakhtin and Buber: Problems of Dialogic Imagination

Recent publications of biographical materials on Mikhail Bakhtin demonstrate that he was familiar with the writings of Martin Buber. The philosophical and aesthetic verbal expression of Buber's ideas within the timespatial universe of Bakhtin's own awareness allows us to discuss this obvious biographical evidence in a wider cultural context. The central opposition of Buber's and Bakhtin's systems is the dialogic dichotomous pair: "Ich und Du" (I and Thou), or "myself and another." Bakhtin's dialogic imagination is rooted in the binaries of the subject-object relations which he initially formulated as "responsibility" and "addressivity," that is to say, as individual awareness and its responsiveness of life. The basic words of Bakhtin's philosophical aesthetics can be understood as the "relation to the other," and their semantics and terminological meaning are directly related to Martin Buber (his work, Ich und Du, 1923). In the 1930s-60s Bakhtin developed the concepts of responsibility and addressivity into his universal dialogic theory of speech-genres. His hierarchy of speechgenres was built in order to establish relations between different sub-genres of the novel (various types of poetic utterances) and different species of individual discourse. However, the entire edifice of this dialogic system remained unfinished, and several types of dialogic relations between individual pronouncements of the characters and individual novelistic genres were not discussed by him. Buber's ideas on the dialogue can be used as a clue to one possible interpretation of the function of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses in different sub-genres of the novel (the novel of confession, the Bildungsroman, the autobiographical novel). In this article, Buber's philosophical cycle is used as an aid in reconstructing the integral whole of Bakhtin's "dialogic imagination," as this dialogic mode of thinking goes through his unfinished works: "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," "The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism," "Toward Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book." This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol9/iss1/3 MIKHAIL BAKHTIN AND MARTIN BUBER: PROBLEMS OF DIALOGIC IMAGINATION Nina Perlina Rutgers University Mikhail Bakhtin is gaining in authority in the scholarly community. Along with this increase in visibility, one can observe a remarkable increase in definitions, attributes, and academic nicknames given to Bakhtin, and, as contemporary labels multiply, an actual sense of Bakhtin's own context is diluted (Thomson, Morson). Because of the diversity of non-homogeneous definitions one has to go back to the history of Bakhtin's intellectual development and elicit information from his biography to recover this sense of context. Such a work is presently in process, Michael Holquist's and Katerina Clark's forthcoming book, for example, The Life and Works of Mikhail Bakhtin. Another important source of biographical data which has appeared recently is the correspondence between Mikhail Bakhtin and Matvey Kagan.' This correspondence, as well as other documents from Kagan's archives, helps us to understand the most significant cultural influences Bakhtin underwent in the years when he came to formulate his views. In addition to Kagan, one must note the influence of Herman Cohen-in particular Cohen's works Kants Begriindung der Aesthetik, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung and Kants Begriindung der Ethik. And one cannot help noticing an astonishing similarity of opinions and formulaic renditions between Mikhail Bakhtin and Martin Buber.2 In his recent publication Mikhail Bakhtine: Le principe dialogique, Tzvetan Todorov also establishes this parallel. "Ich and Du," or "myself and another," the central opposition and starting point of Buber's and Bakhtin's systems, is, of course, not original for either of the thinkers. Following Buber's own explanation of the nature of Ich-Du relationship, Todorov notes that this idea is found in classical, philosophy at least since the end of the