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PATRICK D. MURPHY Dialoguing with Bakhtin over Our Ethical Responsibility to Anothers The Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) provides a valuable set of tools for ecocritical analysis and a method of approaching literary works and their interrelationship with the material world. Bakhtin’s attitude toward language positions him in opposition to Ferdinand de Saussure and Saussurean linguistics. Instead, he can be aligned with his contemporary, Émile Benveniste, as well as current linguists such as George Lako√ and Mark Johnson, who have emphasized discourse over language. This emphasis leads to seeing speaking and writing as individual acts undertaken at particular moments in specific configurations of the world. That recognition of immersion leads to emphasizing the speaker/writer as a social individual on the one hand, and as a physical being on the other hand. As Michael Holquist notes, in his introduction to Art and Answerability, the ideas of Henri Bergson significantly influenced Bakhtin, in particular the recognition that ‘‘the sheer physicality of my body cannot be understood as the locus of my existence without also taking into account the fact that as a living organism I must, whether I will it or not, pay attention to life. . . . A total description of an act would have to include a body, objects (or images of objects) external to it, and a change in the relations between the body and the other images.’’∞ This influence causes Bakhtin to recognize discourse as an embodied and material activity. Bakhtin’s Art and Answerability opens with a brief note that provides the title for this collection. There he stakes out the ethical orientation of his lifelong philosophical project, which can provide a starting point for an ethical literary ecocriticism: ‘‘But what guarantees the inner connection of the constituent elements of a person? Only the unity of answerability. I have to answer with my own life for what I have experienced and understood in art. . . . It is not only mutual answerability that art and life must assume, but also mutual liability to blame.’’≤ What a clear and profound statement, which ∞∑∏ patrick d. murphy moves beyond a vague sense of ‘‘responsibility’’ and clarifies that concept as an act of ‘‘answerability.’’ Critics exist as such because we reply to phenomena that we observe and in which we participate through answering. But answerability represents more than the description of that speaking back; it also represents the necessity of our responsiveness to be ethically grounded and morally justifiable . Hence, Bakhtin emphasizes the ‘‘liability to blame’’ for the shortcomings of our critical responses. Answerability imposes obligations on the ecocritic in relation to environmental issues, representations of ecology, and the quality and functionality of artistic images of nature, environments, ecologies , and human practices. In the second essay in Art and Answerability, Bakhtin adds another crucial concept: transgredience. For the author to represent life, and for the critic to evaluate those representations, Bakhtin argues that he ‘‘must take up a position outside himself, must experience himself on a plane that is di√erent from the one on which we actually experience our own life. . . . He must become another in relation to himself.’’≥ The concept of ‘‘transgredience ,’’ then, connects with the issue of anthropocentrism versus ecocentrism . It addresses the problem of trying to ‘‘speak for nature’’ or to let nature speak through oneself as an author. It also pertains to the task of evaluating artistic representations from a perspective that includes but transcends one’s own tastes and uses for a particular work in order to consider the impact of art on perceptions of human and rest-of-nature relationships. It encourages authors and critics to see themselves through another’s perspective: those of the rest of the natural world at the general level, and of specific ecosystems, plants, or animals at the particular level. The practice of transgredience can lead to a critical autobiographical stance that requires a persistent ethical evaluation of one’s moral behavior: ‘‘After looking at ourselves through the eyes of another, we always return—in life—into ourselves again, and the final, or, as it were, recapitulative event takes place within ourselves in the categories of our own life.’’∂ The experience of adopting the perspective of another must be consolidated as an act of consciousness. The practice of ecocriticism and the promotion of reading environmental literature, then, would always include the potential for, whatever else the reader or critic might want to think about, the evolution of a more ethical interaction with...

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