Borderline Subjectivity: The Futurity of the Present in Bakhtin’s Work

The point of departure for this inquiry into the relation of temporality and ethics is an ancient and persistent dilemma, which I would call the “dead end of omniscience.” It is, at source, a fundamentally theological conception, an axiom rather, of a timeless, all-knowing metaphysical being, towering over and above the apparent open-endedness of human life as perceived by human beings, and encompassing past, present, and future in its vision. Divine knowledge, as Boethius says, “transcends all movement in time. It abides in the simplicity of its present, embraces the boundless extent of past and future, and by virtue of its simple comprehension, it ponders all things as if they were being enacted in the present. . . . For this reason it is better to term it providentia (‘looking forward spatially’) rather than praevidentia (looking ahead in time’)” (111–12). Perhaps the most ancient and certainly the most concise formulation of this dilemma, nearly two thousand years old, is expressed in an adage attributed to Rabbi Akiva, the Jewish sage: “Everything is foreseen, and free will is granted [Ha’kol tzafui ve’ha’reshut netuna]” (The Ethics of the Fathers [Pirkei Avot], 3, 15). Rabbi Akiva’s adage has generated mountains of exegesis in the course of the following centuries, but the central paradox of religion-based ethics remains unresolved: if every act is foreseen and predetermined by that omniscient and all-powerful being which we call God, how can there be any valid conception of free will? How can human beings be said to have any real ethical choice and be held accountable for what they do? Is the experience of free will a mere illusion arising out of our own shortsightedness?

This dilemma, however, is not confined to theological thought. As Yeshayahu Leibowitz noted, it is just as acutely pressing in any and all forms of philosophical and scientific determinism (100–14), or—to put it briefly—any system of thought which is based on uni-linear causality. Religious, philosophical, scientific or—as we shall presently see— aesthetic determinism is, indeed, difficult to reconcile with ethics, which, in most versions, is premised on the possibility of genuinely free choice among alternative modes of action. This, then, is the “dead end of omniscience” which Bakhtin is trying to break through.

Bakhtin’s direct precursor on this quest is Henri Bergson, whose lifelong work revolves on the recognition of this philosophical impasse and the search for an alternative mode of thinking. By the early 1920s, Bergson’s major works had been widely translated into other European languages, including Russian, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1928. Yet perhaps the most significant indication of his stature and the extent of his influence among his contemporaries is the fact that in 1914 his works were put on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Holy Office. Indeed, one must credit the readers on behalf of the Holy Office for the astuteness of their perception, for in spite of the fact that Bergson was not explicitly concerned with theological dogma, he was, in fact, more radically subversive than many of his more outspoken predecessors, and his philosophical legacy—though often downplayed or disregarded today—has laid the foundations for the philosophical work of an entire generation.¹

If Bergson’s philosophy could be summed up in a single idea, it would be formulated, according to Kolakowski (1985), as “time is real.” It is a profoundly anti-determinist position which means “that the future does not exist in any sense” and that “the life of the universe is a creative process, whereby something new and thus unpredictable appears at every moment.” Bergson’s point of departure is the opposition to the Cartesian-Kantian abstract, spatialized conception of time as “a set of homogeneous segments placed next to each other and together composing an indefinitely long line.” Against this homogenized and quantitative conception, Bergson proposes the notion of durée, which is neither homogeneous nor divisible and which cannot be abstracted from movement, but is, in fact “what each of us is: we know it intuitively...