Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject by Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan (review)

At the beginning of her study of Bakhtin, Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan notes that hers is a “book about homesickness” (1). This opening, relating to human experience rather than theoretical concepts, signals what readers will find throughout the book: a different Bakhtin from the one they might know. Indeed, it seems that a central part of Erdinast-Vulcan’s project is to offer a view of the other side of the Bakhtinian coin — not only the polyphonic and the carnivalesque appropriated by poststructuralist and deconstructive theorists but a subjective wholeness despite the inevitability of fragmentation. This longing for “home” thus relates to more than an objective physical space in the world — it relates to a temporal “home” in the past when the subject had a sense of “place” within its own consciousness. The integrated memory of a past self thus drives the subject’s present choices, which, the book suggests, is the seat of ethics, and also creates a future. In this sense, this book about “homesickness” is also about looking to the future by reinvigorating the past.

The past that Erdinast-Vulcan reinvigorates is Bakhtin’s own. She places special emphasis on his early writings, many of which were published posthumously and arrived in the West only in the early 1990s. “Indeed, these texts, and particularly ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,’ appeared to be diametrically opposed to what had been accepted at the time as the Bakhtinian outlook, and much less compatible with the spirit of postmodernity” (4). Her aim is not to reconcile these two Bakhtins — a project that, she says, was attempted the International Bakhtin Conference in 1995. Calling herself a “latecomer” to the debate, she points to Bakhtin’s “elasticity” as accounting both for his having been appropriated by various interpretive and ideological camps and for the waning of interest in his thought in the twenty-first century (5). Her project treats Bakhtin not as a theoretician with a systematic agenda but rather as a thinking and exploring human subject. Her study is thus concerned with the “profound ambivalence” (6) at the core of Bakhtin’s intellectual and spiritual journey.

The spiritual aspect of Bakhtin’s project has to do with the “ontological hunger” (8) to ground subjectivity in a “metaphysical scaffolding” (11) — expressed through a practice of interrogation that can be philosophical, literary, or religious — while recognizing “the open-endedness, fluidity, and inner diversity of actual human experience” (14). Bakhtin’s is a “threshold position … suspended between a critique of the transcendental subject … [and] a deep current of nostalgia for the narrative coherence of subjectivity.” She further argues that “the anxiety generated by this double awareness” is translated into a “tug-of-war between … a profound temperamental religiosity, which may be defined as a metaphysical homesickness, and a powerful need to break free of any form of external containment” (14–15). This tension, she suggests, raises an ethical question — that of the subject’s emergence out of this metaphysical anxiety and ambivalence. Through a focused study of Bakhtin’s writings, the first part of the book presents Bakhtin’s “poetics of subjectivity,” his transition from an ocular to an auditory structuring metaphor, the importance of “refraction” as an alternative to the visual-auditory dichotomy, and a return of Bakhtin from the context of postmodernist theorists to that of literary modernists — to whom, Erdinast-Vulcan argues, Bakhtin was closer both in time and in spirit.

The second part of the book brings Bakhtin’s exploration of the subject into dialogue with three contemporaneous thinkers — Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Lévinas, whose lines of inquiry hold uncanny similarities to Bakhtin’s. History kept these three thinkers largely ignorant of Bakhtin’s works, which were not only unreachable behind the Iron Curtain but largely repressed within the Soviet Union until after Stalin’s death. Erdinast-Vulcan makes a strong case, in the introduction and throughout the book, for the problematizing of Cartesian subjectivity and Kantian...