Bakhtin Meets Levinas 1

“Between the Face and the Voice: Bakhtin Meets Levinas”

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan

Continental Philosophy Review, Continental Philosophy Review 41.1 (2008), 43-58.

Abstract. The essay draws on a little-known fragment from M.M. Bakhtin's Draft

Exercise Notebooks of 1943 to highlight both the affinities and the divergences of the

respective philosophical projects of Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas. The first part of the

discussion follows their parallel itineraries through several points of convergence, from a

sense of profound philosophical disenchantment to a conception of the ethical subject as

living on borderlines, facing the other, irremediably vulnerable and infinitely responsible.

The second part focuses on the "dialogic impasse" and its attempted resolution through

gestures of triangulation, evidenced in Levinas's "third" and Bakhtin's "superaddresee."

The third part of the discussion, beginning with Bakhtin's and Levinas's different readings

of Dostoevsky, focuses on the ultimate divergence of their philosophical positions, and

suggests that Bakhtin's discursive conception of subjectivity may point the direction

towards a more viable thinking of a post-metaphysical ethics.

Keywords. Bakhtin ; Levinas; Subjectivity; Ethics; The Third;

Superaddressee; Love; Face; Voice

I. Convergences

Mikhail Mikhailovitch Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas are philosophers of exile.

Writing on the ruins of a civilization, they share both the sensibilities of survivors in a

world whose onto-theological fundaments have collapsed, and an incurable

temperamental religiosity which persists in the face of that collapse. Indeed, the affinity

between these two philosophers of alterity--far beyond the mere accident of their
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 2

common antecedents, mother-tongue and cultural contexts—will not come as a revelation

to readers of either thinker.1 Both Bakhtin and Levinas set out on a quest to recover ethics

in the absence or against the silence of God; both can no longer find consolation in the

metaphysics of presence and totality, or resort to the legacy of the absolute; both have

been disinherited in more than one sense.

The first point of convergence in the parallel itineraries of these two philosophers

is a sense of disenchantment with traditional Western Philosophy, that mode of

theorizing which identifies true knowledge with abstraction, generalization and

systematization, as it strives to assimilate the other to the Same. The history of Western

Philosophy, writes Levinas, "can be interpreted as an attempt at universal synthesis, a

reduction of all experience, of all that is reasonable, to a totality wherein consciousness

embraces the world, leaves nothing other outside of itself, and thus becomes absolute

thought."2

Bakhtin, too, begins his life-long philosophical project with a diagnosis of the

"peculiar state of sterility," a dissociation produced by what he calls “fatal theoreticism"

in contemporary [i.e. Kantian] philosophical thinking.3 Underlying the philosophical

distress which is evident in these passages is the failure of philosophical ethics. Both

thinkers perceive formal, Kantian ethics as dissociated from the lived, concrete

experience of ethical choice and action, entailing the loss of the individual act,

obliterating its specificity, historicity and uniqueness. The "theoretical world," Bakhtin

1
For the most relevant discussions of this affinity, see Ponzio (1987) and Gardiner

(1996).
2
Ethics and Infinity (1982), p. 75. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as EI.
3
Toward a Philosophy of the Act (1919-1921/ 1986), p. 18. Hereafter abbreviated in

the text as PhA.

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 3

writes "is obtained through an essential and fundamental abstraction from the fact of my

unique being and from the moral sense of that fact –‘as if I did not exist.’ ” (PhA, p. 9).

Against the "nostalgia for totality" (EI , p. 76), as Levinas refers to it, or

"fatal theoreticism," as Bakhtin calls it, both thinkers are trying to articulate an

alternative conception of a "first philosophy" which would address the questions of

ethics and subjectivity. Rather than normative formal and abstract systems,

propositions and universal laws, they both aim to address the unique, the private

and the concrete. What they offer is "a phenomenology” of ethical subjectivity

(PhA, p. 32): a description of "the actual, concrete architectonic of value-governed

experiencing of the world" (PhA, p. 61), of the attitude and the position of the

subject in the encounter with the other.

For Levinas, "the character of value . . . comes from a specific attitude of

consciousness, of a non-theoretical intentionality… irreducible to

knowledge….The relationship with the Other can be thought as an irreducible

intentionality" (EI, p. 32). The ethical moment is a “putting in question” of the

knowing subject, a dismantling of his or her claims for autonomy and sovereignty.

The somewhat cumbersome neologisms coined by Levinas--"otherwise than

being” (autrement qu’etre), “beyond essence" (au-dela de l’essence), “non-

indifference”—are all generated in the attempt to capture that which is not

recognized by the language of philosophical knowledge.

Bakhtin, too, argues that “the ought is . . . a certain attitude of

consciousness, the structure of which we intend to disclose phenomenologically.

There are no moral norms that are determinate and valid in themselves as moral

norms, but there is a moral subiectum with a determinate structure . . . and it is

upon him that we have to rely” (PhA, p. 6). To be truly ethical, the encounter with
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 4

the other must not be an assimilation of the other into the Same; it must leave the

alterity of the other untouched, irreducible; above all, it must grant the other's

transcendence of any containment and closure from without.

It is thus that the distinction between knowledge and eros emerges. "Knowledge,"

write Levinas, "has always been interpreted as assimilation. Even the most surprising

discoveries end by being absorbed, comprehended, with all that there is of ‘prehending’

in ‘comprehending." The most audacious and remote knowledge does not put us in

communion with the truly other; it does not take the place of sociality; it is still and

always a solitude" (EI, p.60). Against knowledge, defined as the "suppression of alterity,"

Levinas offers the conception of eros which, he believes, does not reduce the other to the

same. "Alterity and duality do not disappear in the loving relationship. The idea of a love

that would be a confusion between two beings is a false romantic idea. The pathos of the

erotic relationship is the fact of being two, and that the other is absolutely other." (EI, p.

66). The complexity of Levinas's conception of love is beyond the scope of the present

discussion, but we should note the persistence of his juxtaposition of love against

possession, power, and knowledge. "The relationship with the face," he writes, "is not an

object-cognition."4 And while critique or philosophy is "the essence of knowing", it is not

knowledge that is "the possibility of going unto an object," but its ability "to put itself in

question." It is a form of knowledge which cannot be reduced to objective cognition, as it

"leads to the Other," to the doubt rather than to the certainty of the cogito. (TI, p. 85).

"Nothing is further from Eros than possession." (TI, p. 265). It is a relationship with

irreducible and uncontainable alterity. 5 It is no wonder, then, that in his quest for another

4
Totality and Infinity (1961/1969), p. 75. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as TI.
5
On the conception of love as opposed to knowledge, see also Emmanuel Levinas,
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 5

way of knowing, Levinas reverses the definition of Philosophy as "the love of wisdom"

by defining it as "the wisdom of love." (1974/1981, p. 161).

The same distinction emerges in Bakhtin’s fragment from "Draft Exercise

Notebooks," when he writes of an ‘element of violence” which characterizes both the act

of cognition and, significantly, of aesthetic/artistic form-giving6:

A preliminary deadening [umershshvlenie] of an object [predmet]—[is] a pre-

condition of cognition; subduing the world (converting the world into an object of

consumption)--its goal. What is the deadening power of the artistic image: to

overtake the object from the side of the future, to show the object in its

exhaustiveness and thereby to deprive it of the open future, to give it in all its

boundaries, both internal and external, without any exit for it out of this

Time and the Other, pp. 76, 88, 90-91. Hereafter abbreviated in the text as TO. Levinas himself

points to a modification in his conception of love between the writing of Time and the Other and

Entre Nous , where he says that "Agape is neither a derivative nor the extinction of love-Eros."

Whereas the latter seems to be linked with enjoyment, or with concupiscence, the former is

conceived as closer to what Levinas earlier defines as "fecundity" or "paternity" (TI, pp. 267-269),

and later describes "in terms of responsibility for the other" (Entre Nous, p. 113).
6
M. M. Bakhtin, “From Draft Exercise Notebooks” (1943-61. p.154). Hereafter

abbreviated in the text as "Draft." These fragments were subsequently reprinted in

volume V of Bakhtin's Collected Works, Sobranie socinenii v semi tomakh, v. Raboty

1940-x-nachala 1960-x godov, eds. G. Bocharov and L. A. Gogotishvily (Moscow,

Russkie Slovari, 1966. However, as they have not yet been published in English

translation and are therefore less accessible or familiar to Western readers, I have

quoted them at some length in this essay. I am very grateful to Victoria Clebanov for

her thoughtful and responsible translation of these notes.

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 6

framedness—here it is all and there is no more of it elsewhere; if it is all here up

to the end, then it is dead and can be devoured, it is removed out of the

unfinalized life and becomes an object of possible consumption; it ceases to be an

independent participant in the life event, … it has already uttered its last word,

there is no internal open nucleus left in it, nor is there an internal infinity.

Freedom is denied it, the act of cognition wants to surround it completely, cut it

off from incompleteness, [and] therefore, from freedom, from the temporal and

semantic future, from its unresolvedness and from its inward truth. (“Draft,"

pp.153-4)

There is much to be said of this passage to which I will come back at a later point.

For the present, however, we should note that the conflation of cognition and the act of

aesthetic authoring as forms of "deadening," violent containment is a far cry from

Bakhtin’s initial benign view of authorial “consummation from without," which is so

amply evident in “Author and Hero” of the early 1920’s.7 One might speculate that,

following his own farcical trial in 1929 and his subsequent exile, Bakhtin's view of the

authorial other was somewhat less benign in 1943. Against the authorial consummating

and totalizing gaze, against the presumed power of total cognition and aesthetization,

Bakhtin, like Levinas, offers a concept of love which retains the alterity of the beloved,

and does not seek to assimilate it or to contain its openness into the future.

Only love can see and represent the inner freedom of an object . . . The absolute

unconsumability [nepotrebimost] of the object is revealed only to love; love

leaves it whole and situated outside of itself and side by side with itself (or

behind). Love fondles and caresses borders; borders take on a new significance.

7
"Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" (1922-4), hereafter abbreviated in the text

as "AH."
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 7

Love does not speak about an object in its absence [zaochno], but speaks about it

with the object itself. (“Draft," p.154)

The correlate of unassimilated alterity in Levinas's work is the face of the other.

But rather than a visual phenomenon, an object of the gaze which would enframe, contain

and absorb it, Levinas relates to the face in auditory terms, as that which makes the

ethical demand, the call to which the subject must respond:

One can say that the face is not “seen." It is what cannot become a content, which

your thought would embrace; it is uncontainable, it leads you beyond. It is in this

that the signification of the face makes it escape from being, as a correlate of a

knowing. Vision, to the contrary, is a search for adequation; it is what par

excellence absorbs being. But the relation to the face is straightaway ethical. . . . .

Face and discourse are tied. The face speaks. It speaks, it is in this that it renders

possible and begins all discourse. I have just refused the notion of vision to

describe the relationship with the Other. It is Discourse, and, more exactly,

response or responsibility which is this authentic relationship. (EI, pp. 86-8)

Why, then, does Levinas insist on a metaphor which, being primarily visual,

requires such a degree of modification and qualification? Why does he choose to signify

discourse through the face rather than through the voice? The answer to that may have to

do with the Hebrew root of the word panim (face) which is the same as the verbal root of

"turning." Noting this relation, Susan Handleman (1993) reads the figure of the face as a

"facing relation," a "turning toward the other," which calls into question the separate,

narcissistic ego. Facing, says Handleman, is therefore "a disruption" of the autonomous,

sovereign self-identical Cartesian subject (pp. 50, 61). As we shall presently see,
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 8

however, the problematic signification through the call of the face is symptomatic of a

profound ambivalence in Levinas's work.

Remarkably, Bakhtin proposes a similar juxtaposition through a distinction of

"image" and "face." The image, for him, is a product of cognition, of aesthetic

consummation and definition from without. It closes off the subject and denies it the gift

of the future: “The image forces [the subject] to become identical to itself, immerses it in

the hopelessness of the finalized and the ready-made. The image takes advantage of all

the privileges of its outsideness. The back of the head, the ears and the back of the object

are in the foreground of the image. All these are limits (“Draft," pp. 154-5). The face, he

says in what sounds like an echo or a pre-figuration of Levinas, is that which should

speak. Becoming an image, accepting a definition from without, away from the

"speaking face," is a kind of death. It is an extinction of "the infinity of one’s axiological

self-consciousness," a metamorphosis into dead matter, into an ‘object for swallowing up

and consuming.’ ("Draft," p. 155).

The paradigm of intersubjectivity is no longer epistemological, as both Levinas

and Bakhtin move from cognition to love: It is the speaking face of the other rather than

his or her reified image which elicits the ethical response and calls for the ‘answerability’

[otvetstvennost ] of the subject. Only in love can the subject retain the mode of being

which Bakhtin calls ‘I-for-myself,' which allows for one’s “inner infinity” ("Draft," p.

155), for alterity and for change. The little note scribbled in the exercise books-- “search

for a new plane of I and Other encounter” ("Draft," p. 155)---seems to offer a concise

definition of the quest undertaken by both Bakhtin and Levinas.

The facing of alterity is not only inter-subjective, but intra-subjective as well.

Living on its own borderlines, the subject's mode of being is always diachronic, projected

ahead of itself. Time, says Levinas, is "not a simple experience of duration, but a
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 9

dynamism which leads us elsewhere than toward the things we possess. It is as if in time

there were a movement beyond what is equal to us. Time as a relationship to unattainable

alterity and, thus, an interruption of rhythm and its returns" (EI, p. 61). The absolute

alterity which defines the future is the mode of being which is always yet-to-be, never

identical to itself, and always reaches out beyond its presence to itself. "The other is the

future," says Levinas. It is unknowable and impossible to grasp and possess. Time, or

futurity, is the subject's very relationship with the other and with itself (TO, p. 77 and

passim; EI , p. 57).

As we have already seen, Bakhtin conceives the projection of the self into the

temporal and semantic future, the diachronic unravelling of subjectivity, as a pre-

condition of ethical freedom: “I need to be open for myself—at least in all the essential

moments constituting my life; I have to be, for myself, someone who is axiologically yet-

to-be, someone who does not coincide with his already existing makeup” ("AH," p. 13).

The ethical subject is never adequate to itself, it is ‘nonunitary in principle” (“AH," pp.

83, 118); “present to itself as a task," “incapable of being given, of being present-on-

hand, of being contemplated” (“AH," pp. 100, 109). This non-coincidence with oneself,

the self projecting itself ahead of itself in time, is translated in Bakhtin's work into the

concept of the "loophole" which is—precisely as in Levinas-- pitted against the concept

of "rhythm": “I myself as subiectum never coincide with me myself: I—the subiectum of

the act of self-consciousness—exceed the bounds of this act’s content. . . . a loophole out

of time, out of everything given, everything finitely present on hand. I do not, evidently,

experience the whole of myself in time” ("AH," p. 109). Most explicitly, the connection

is made in the fragment from the "Draft Exercise Notebooks," where the concept of

freedom is synonymous with the unresolved and incomplete perspective of "the temporal
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 10

and semantic future," and the "internal infinity," which is the "inward truth" of the subject

[predmet ] and the precondition of the ethical act. ("Draft," p. 153).

Response and responsibility, answer and answerability [otvetstvennost]—these

etymological links seem to testify to the wisdom of language itself. But to become what

we ought to be, we need to acknowledge our responsibility, to take on that burden of

uniqueness which puts us into an obligatory relationship with the rest of the world. Here,

too, we find an uncanny similarity of idiom and register between Bakhtin and Levinas.

For Bakhtin,

[it] is not the content of an obligation that obligates me, but my signature below

it—the fact that at one time I acknowledged or undersigned the given

acknowledgment. And what compelled me to sign at the moment of undersigning

was not the content of the given performed act or deed. This content could not by

itself, in isolation, have prompted me to perform the act or deed—to undersign-

acknowledge it, but only in correlation with my decision to undertake an

obligation—by performing the act of undersigning-acknowledging....the

answerable deed, an acknowledgment that is once-occurrent and never-repeatable,

emotional-volitional and concretely individual.(PhA, pp. 38-9)

“The ought," then, is not an abstract universal principle or a categorical

imperative, but "a certain attitude of consciousness" elicited in the "moral subiectum" in a

particular and concrete context, at a specific time and place (PhA, p. 6). The singularity

of the subject, its unique position in time and space at any given moment, is translated

ethically into "my non-alibi in Being," a sense of ineluctable responsibility, as "that

which can be done by me can never be done by anyone else" (PhA, p. 40). The ethical, or

"answerable" act, is "precisely that act which is performed on the basis of an

acknowledgment of my obligative (ought-be) uniqueness" (PhA, p. 42). Again, we find

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 11

the most concise articulation of this constitutive a-symmetry of the subject and the other

in the fragment from the Notebooks:

From the ‘objective’ point of view there exist man, personality, etc., but the

difference between I and the other is relative; all and everyone are I, all and

everyone are the other… . and nevertheless I feels itself to be an exception, and

only I in the world (the rest is others) and lives from this juxtaposition. Thereby

the ethical sphere of the absolute inequality of I to all the others, the eternal and

absolute exclusion of I (justified exclusion) is created. ("Draft," p. 156)

For Levinas, too, the subject is defined by his or her acknowledgement—or

testimony, as he calls it—of responsibility. “Responsibility in fact is not a simple attribute

of subjectivity, as if the latter already existed in itself, before the ethical relationship.

Subjectivity is not for itself; it is one again, initially for another. . . .. I say: here I am!’ “

([me voici], (EI, pp. 96-7). It is, of course, significant, that the response to the other

echoes the Biblical form of response to the summons of Divinity (Genesis 22), but rather

than a higher authority of a supreme authorial being, the source of the ethical command

to which the subject is answerable is to be found in the constitution of the subject, in the

same singularity:

My responsibility is untransferable, no one could replace me. In fact, it is a /

matter of saying the very identity of the human I starting from responsibility, that

is starting from this position or deposition of the sovereign I in self consciousness,

a deposition which is precisely its responsibility for the Other. Responsibility is

what is incumbent on me exclusively, and what, humanely, I cannot refuse. This

charge is a supreme dignity of the unique. I am I in the sole measure that I am

responsible, a none-interchangeable I. I can substitute myself for everyone, but

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 12

one can substitute himself for me. Such is my inalienable identity of subject. It is

in this precise sense that Dostoevsky said: “we are all responsible for all men

before all, and I am more than all the others.” (EI , pp. 100-1)

Emerging from these passages is a conception of ethics which is not premised on

the universal sameness of human beings but on their radical alterity, that ineluctable a-

symmetry which is purely phenomenological, deriving from the fact that we are always

situated, located within a specific and singular context of action, time, and place. When

we recall that the meaning of alibi is "no-elsewhere," Bakhtin's use of this forensic term

becomes much clearer, much closer, in fact, to Levinas's "here I am." The link between

the subject's singularity and his or her ethical responsibility is mediated through the

"deposition of the sovereign I," a conception of subjectivity as preceded and constituted

by inter-subjectivity. For Bakhtin, too, the ethical subject is always already displaced and

deposed. The “pre-condition for life," he writes, is “a passionate non-acceptance of one’s

place in life” (“Draft," p. 153). This foundational a-topia of subjectivity is the central

paradox of being which hollows out all claims of sovereignty and autonomy. “A person,"

Bakhtin writes, “has no internal territory, he is wholly and always on the boundary"

(1961, pp. 287-8). Being singularly situated, the subject cannot claim an alibi, cannot

evade her involvement or dispose of her own responsibility; living on borderlines, the

deposed subject is constituted by its relation to the other.

For Bakhtin, the living proof of this "borderline subjectivity" is to be found in

the workings of discourse. Beginning with what he diagnoses as a Dostoevskean

"small-scale Copernican revolution." 8 Dostoevsky's polyphonic mode of authoring,

and the fundamental "addressivity" of his characters' discourse (PDP, p. 251) are

8
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929/1963), p. 49. Hereafter abbreviated in the
text as PDP.
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 13

indeed revolutionary when extrapolated by Bakhtin, who would later come to see the

same dynamics as operative in novelistic discourse in general, and finally, in human

communication as such:

The dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that is, of course, a

property of any discourse. It is the natural orientation of any living discourse .

. . . The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a

future answer-word. . . . Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already

spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet

been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word.

Such is the situation in any living dialogue (1934-5, pp. 279-280).9

This "borderline sensibility"—the recognition that "discourse [and the subject]

lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own context and another, alien, context"

(1961, p. 284)--is most explicit in Bakhtin's later writings10, but its seeds are clearly

already sown in the early fragment, Toward a Philosophy of the Act.

Far from a mere rhetorical trope, the concern with borderlines and territorial

enclosures which is much in evidence in the work of both Bakhtin and Levinas is

central to their thinking of ethics. In the epigraph to Otherwise than Being, Levinas

quotes a sentence of Pascal: “This is my place in the sun. That is how the usurpation

9
See also "Discourse in the Novel" (1934-5, pp. 259-422), and "The Problem of

Speech Genres" (1953-4, pp. 60-102), where dialogicity becomes the foundational

premise of Bakhtin's meta-linguistics.

10
See "The Problem of Speech Genres" (1952-3, pp. 69, 89, 91, 93); "Notes made in

1970-71" (1970-1, p. 143); and "Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences,"

(1974, pp. 160-161).

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 14

of the whole world began." This epigraph, written at the very beginning of God’s

Disappearing Act, remains acutely relevant at turn of the 21st Century: Can one’s

place in the sun be other than a usurpation of another’s? The tentative answer offered

by Bakhtin and Levinas may well be naive, but it is by no means utopian: a move

from metaphysics to ethics, from revelation to testimony, from sameness to alterity,

from space to time. If inter-subjectivity is prior to subjectivity, we can no longer relate

to the self as a territorial enclosure. Living on borderlines is what we should all do.

II. The Dialogic Impasse

But the phenomenological description of subjectivity in terms of need and

response still falls short of an alternative conception of ethics, and the deposition of the

sovereign self-identical Cartesian subject still leaves us with some fundamental questions

unanswered: How does the subject—needy and responsive as it may be—bridge the gap

between the "is" and the "ought"? What is that power which guarantees an ethical

response—the signature, the acknowledgement-- in a given context? What are the

signposts which may point the way towards the good in the absence of Kantian

universals? On what ground--given the subject's response to the call of the other-- can

one make a choice between multiple others? The transition from the dialogic encounter,

the private dyadic and intimate relationship which Levinas and Bakhtin call love, to an

alternative conception of ethics is a difficult one, for it is precisely in the absence of this

relationship, that is, in our dealings with the stranger, unloved but equally deserving of

justice, that the need for signposts will arise most powerfully. It is in the absence of a

personal bond or subjective addressivity that we seem to need is precisely that regulative

ethics for our social togetherness.

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 15

The impasse of a purely dyadic conception of subjectivity leads both Levinas and

Bakhtin towards a gesture of triangulation which is meant to enable the move to a

responsible philosophical conception of ethics. In Levinas's work it is the concept of the

“third” (tiers), which intrudes into the dyadic intimate relation between the subject and

his/her intimate, particular other:

How is it that there is justice? I answer that it is the fact of the multiplicity of men

and the presence of someone else next to the Other, which condition the laws and

establish justice. If I am alone with the Other, I owe him everything; but there is

someone else….The interpersonal relation I establish with the Other, I must also

establish with other men; there is thus a necessity to moderate this privilege of the

Other; from whence comes justice. (EI, pp. 89-90)11

Time and again, Levinas goes back to the concept of the third to account for the

transition from intersubjective transcendence to social responsibility, but this gesture of

triangulation is as far as he goes. And, as we will soon see, it is not far enough.12

Bakhtin triangulates his dialogic conception through the "super-addressee" which

creeps into the later writings. After decades of work on a dialogic conception of the

human subject, a conception which went through several permutations, but has always

retained its centrifugal, oppositional, anti-totalitarian thrust, Bakhtin introduces the

11
See also the section on "The Other and the Others" in Totality and Infinity (1961/

1969, pp. 212-14); Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974, pp. 157-162;

158, 160); and Time and the Other ( 1947; 2nd edn.1977/1986, p. 106).
12
For good discussions of the Third and the question of justice in Levinas's thought

see Peperzak (1993), and Critchley (1992).

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 16

"superaddressee" as a third element, which seems to hollow out or at least complicate the

very conception of dialogue13:

An utterance always has an addressee (of various sorts, with varying degrees of

proximity, concreteness, awareness, and so forth) whose responsive understanding

the author of the speech work seeks and surpasses. This is the second party…. But

in addition to this addressee (the second party), the author of the utterance, with a

greater or lesser awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee (third), whose

absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical

distance or in a distant historical time (the loophole addressee). In various ages

and with various understandings of the world, this superaddressee and his ideally

true responsive understanding assume various ideological expressions (God,

absolute truth, the course of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court

of history, science, and so forth). . . . Each dialogue takes place as if against the

background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party

who stands above all the participants in the dialogue. 14

13
We should note that this new turn comes about at a time of relative relaxation in

state censorship in the Soviet Union, when Bakhtin himself was finally, at the end of

his life, going through a phase of rehabilitation and recognition. It may well be the

case that Bakhtin felt he could now introduce this new factor which would act as a

centripetal ballast and counter the centrifugal, potentially relativistic pull of his earlier

work.
14
"The Problem of the Text" (1959-1961, p.126). Hereafter abbreviated in the text as

"PT."
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 17

Apparently aware of the problematic implications of this new presence, Bakhtin

immediately adds that the Superaddressee, who is "a constitutive aspect of the whole

utterance," is not "any mystical or metaphysical being (although, given a certain

understanding of the world, he can be expressed as such)" ("PT," p.126). This disclaimer

notwithstanding, this new participant seems to be positioned above the interlocutors, like

a supreme principle of arbitration: it is hard to conceive of this ultimate listener as

anything but the "supreme-author" or "ultimate Other" who stages his comeback through

the back door, offering the consolation of metaphysical grounding which seems to hollow

out the very concept of the dialogue. Indeed, as many of Bakhtin's readers have felt, there

is a distinctly metaphysical dimension to this new participant.15

15
In one of the earliest responses to this issue, Iris M. Zavala argues for a Bakhtinian

triadic model of communication, a model for responsive understanding between social

subjects, where the listener or the "third" has a regulatory role which affects meaning

and closure. Significantly, Zavala links this communicative model to Saint

Augustine's "third I," who is "the intended moral effect of a closing down of the

enunciatory gap; the complete individual (collective to Bakthin), which will be called

upon to hold in place the circuit of guarantees between subject and knowledge. See

"Bakhtin and the Third: Communication as Response" (1989, pp. 51, 57). Caryl

Emerson and Gary Saul Morson relate to the superaddressee (nadadresat) as "a

principle of hope," which is constitutive in every utterance, a perfect listener who "is

not an ideaological but a metalinguistic fact," and conclude that "God may be dead,

but in some form the Superadddresee is always with us" (1990, pp.135-6); Michael

Holquist writes that "poets who feel misunderstood in their lifetimes, martyrs for lost

political causes, quite ordinary people caught in lives of quiet desperation—all have

been correct to hope that outside the tyranny of the present there is a possible
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 18

Have we come full circle, then? Is this a return of metaphysics through the back

door?16 Not quite. I would suggest that what emerges from the work of both Bakhtin and

Levinas is a shift from a vertical orientation towards the Authorial Other or the proverbial

Auctor Mundi as the source of the ethical command to a lateral relationship wherein

human inter-subjectivity (the opening up to alterity) is extrapolated into the realm of the

divine. Temperamentally religious as both Levinas and Bakhtin are, they can no longer

resort to the hypothesis of God as an infrastructure for ethics. In their Post-Holocaust,

Post-Stalinist world, where God has finally accomplished his retreat into silence or death,

the source of ethical imperative can no longer be thought to emanate from a divine

Providence or an abstract system, and God can no longer be thematized and postulated as

the supreme Author. What Bakhtin and Levinas offer is a reversal of the onto-theological

paradigm: It is not the human subject who aspires to imitate the infinite goodness of

divinity, as the very concept of divinity (or the infinite, in Levinas's terms) consists in the

attainment of the ultimate level of inter-human subjectivity. The Levinasian encounter

with the infinite Other passes through the personal human other: 'l'absolument Autre,

c'est Autrui" (TI , p. 39). The religious dimension of human existence cannot and should

not be eradicated, but it derives from the inter-subjective constitution of the subject and

addressee who will understand them" (1990, p. 38); Craig Brandist links the

superaddressee as linked to the Marburg School conception of "the idea of God,"

which functions as "a sort of guarantor against the degeneration of plurality of

perspective into meaningless relativism" (2002, p.169); and Graham Pechey sees the

superaddresee as a hypothetical but invariably implicit premise of a "Habermassian

ideal speech situation" (1999, p.361).

16
For a reading of the Superaddressee as symptomatic of Bakhtin's metaphysical

nostalgia, see Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan (1995).

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 19

its relationship with alterity. Ethics precedes metaphysics, but the metaphysical persists

as a form of desire."What remains irreducible to any deconstruction," Derrida would

write as an afterthought, "is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise . .

. a messianism without religion . . . an idea of justice" (1994, p. 59).

III. The Divergence

Having traced the parallel philosophical itineraries of Bakhtin and Levinas, I

would now turn to the point of their divergence. Both Bakhtin and Levinas enlist

Dostoevsky in their engagement with the relationship of the subject and its other, but

rather than yet another junction of convergence, it is precisely in this invocation that we

can most clearly see the line of their division. Levinas's formulation of "we are all

responsible to all and for all, and I more than all the others," directly and explicitly

borrowed from Dostoevsky, recurs about a dozen times in his work, and becomes the

recurrent motto, indeed the credo of his ethical position.17 What Levinas offers in this

Dostoevskean allusion is a kenotic model of subjectivity, modeled on the Russian

spiritual tradition of the saints' lives, and premised on the subject's "radical humility," its

"originary or preoriginay responsibility or guilt," on the absolute a-symmetry of self and

other (Robbins, 1999, p. 47).

While this thematic reading is entirely in keeping with Levinas's postulates of the

absolute primacy of the other, the non-reciprocity of the ethical relationship, the

vocabulary of "summons" and "injunction," it is much more difficult to reconcile it with

17
Jill Robbins (1999, pp. 147-150). The phrase is first articulated in The Brothers

Karamazov by Father Zosima's elder brother, Markel, on his deathbed; it is later

repeated by Father Zosima in his recounting of his own conversion; and then

recounted by his disciple, Alyosha Karamazov.

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 20

Levinas's explicit discursive orientation, his insistence on the primacy of the "saying"

over the "said" and his non-visual conception of the face as that which "speaks."18 As his

self-abdicating saintly subject takes his cue from the explicit imperative of a particular

Dostoevkean character and becomes "more responsible than everyone else," Levinas

retains, in fact, the metaphysical absoluteness of the unconditional, unreciprocal

subjection to the Other. His perception of the ethical subject remains entirely within the

realm of the "said," a categorical imperative which is absolute, binding, and non-

negotiable. Going back for a moment to the "face" which looms so large in Levinas's

philosophy, we should note here that the Hebrew verbal root of "face" (Panim; Pana)

means not only bodily "turning," as Handleman has pointed out, but also an

"addressing," as in a request or a question. But Levinas does not follow up this rich

allusiveness which seems to have motivated his initial choice of the term. His insistence

on the non-visual, "speaking face" nothwithsanding, it seems that the ocular sense of this

metaphor has taken over, after all, obscuring the discursive, dialogic, and—yes,

reciprocal—nature of the ethical relationship. As Paul Ricoeur (1990) has succinctly put

it: "Levinas's entire philosophy rests on the initiative of the other in the intersubjective

relation. In reality, this initiative establishes no relation at all, to the extent that the other

represents absolute exteriority with respect to an ego defined by the condition of

separation. The other, in this sense, absolves himself of any relation" (pp. 188-9).

The questions proliferate. If the conception of the saintly subject who lays himself

unconditionally (and uncritically) open to the call of the other emerges from a

phenomenological description of intersubjectivity, as Levinas seems to propose, why

aren't we all saints? Given the imperative of an a-priori obligation to the other, how can

18
See also Ethics and Infinity (1982, pp. 42, 87-8); and Time and the Other (1947;
nd
2 ed, 1979/1987, p. 103).
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 21

the deposed subject make any truly ethical choices? If the obligation to the other—any

other—is unconditional and infinite, how can one relate to a plurality of conflicting

demands, to the call of the Levinasian "third," and the fourth, and the fifth other? The fact

that the Hebrew word for the single face (panim) has a plural form is, perhaps, more than

a mere linguistic oddity.

For Bakhtin, however, the "Copernican revolution" launched by Dostoevsky has

little to do with what any of the characters say, their ethical positions, personalities, or

religious convictions. Rather than in any thematic formulation or thesis, the revolutionary

potential of Dostoevsky's work, as Bakthin reads it, lies entirely in the "saying," that is,

the discursive relationship between author and character and among the characters

themselves. Whether this reading of Dostoevsky can be fully substantiated by a close

textual analysis (which Bakhtin does not do) is not as relevant as the fact that the

paradigm shift which Bakhtin ascribes to Dostoevsky is, in fact, a major turnabout in his

own philosophical project. In the earlier essay, "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,"

the author is defined as "a principle of seeing," the sum total of "the transgredient

moments of seeing that are actively referred to the hero and his world" ("AH" pp. 207,

208); the "aesthetically productive" relationship of author to hero is founded on the

author's "outsideness," a position of "transgredience," an "excess of seeing" which

enables him to "enframe" the hero, to "consummate" him, to render him whole, to contain

him within his context, against his background, between the moments of his birth and his

death ("AH," p.148). It is, as we have seen, precisely what Bakhtin will later describe as

the "deadening power of the artistic image," a denial of the internal freedom of the

subject who becomes an object of "finalization" ("Draft," p.154).

Dostoevsky, as read by Bakhtin, has abdicated that deadening authorial

prerogative: his characters are no longer finalized artistic images, but living voices which
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 22

will not be contained by or subsumed under the authorial word. "Dostoevsky's hero is not

an objectified image but an autonomous discourse, pure voice; we do not see him, we

hear him; everything that we see and know apart from his discourse is nonessential and is

swallowed up by discourse as its raw material" (PDP, p. 53); "The hero [is] not a

voiceless object. Character is discourse. Authorial discourse is addressed to the character.

It is not about the character" (PDP, p. 63). What we have here is much more than a

literary innovation: it is, in fact, a new cultural paradigm, which ranges far beyond the

realm of aesthetics. The "peculiar 'revolt' of the hero against his literary finalization" is

not only an artistic transition. It entails a deeper ethical meaning, as "a living human

being cannot be turned into the voiceless object of some secondhand, finalizing cognitive

process" (PDP, p. 58).

The very same principle of non-coincidence with oneself, of a "yet-to-be" mode

of subjectivity, which characterizes Bakhtin's ethical subject is extended to Dostoevsky's

fictional characters: "In Dostoevsky's artistic thinking, the genuine life of the personality

takes place at the point of non-coincidence between a man and himself" (PDP, p. 59).

Dostoevsky's characters, whatever their ideological positions may be, retain the "capacity

to outgrow, as it were, from within and to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing

definition of themselves. As long as a person is alive he lives by the fact that he is not yet

finalized, that he has not yet uttered his ultimate word" (PDP, p.59). The Dostoevskean

revolution is, in fact, a transition from aesthetic containment to the ethical relationship,

from the aesthetic image to the speaking face/voice, which can always say "no" to its

author. Dostoevsky does not insist on having the last word.

It is, then, in Bakhtin's reading, which focuses on the discursive dynamics of

Dostoevsky's novels rather than to any thesis or profession of faith, that the radical move

from the "said" to the "saying" is made, and it is this move which enables a conception of
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 23

the ethical as predicated on the subject's discursive position in relation to the other. While

Levinas might say that "it is only because I acknowledge the other's claim on me that I

subsequently 'speak' to the other" (Crowell, 2003, p. 29), Bakhtin would certainly put

discourse first. This is not a question of rhetoric, but an entirely different conception of

subjectivity and ethics.

Bakhtin is not afraid of reciprocity. Neither does he advocate an unconditional

subjection and martyrdom of the self before the demand—any demand-- of the other.19

Bakhtin's conception of ethics, fragmented as it is, can offer a corrective to Levinas's

because the distinction between the "saying" and the "said," or—to use Bakhtin's and

Voloshinov's terms—the "utterance" and the "sentence," remains operative throughout it.

Bakhtin's "superaddressee" and Levinas's "third" are both belated escape clauses from the

potential relativity of dialogics, and in both their projects there is at least a residual appeal

to metaphysics. But whereas Levinas's "third" remains at the level of an other to whom

one owes, as the Levinasian ethical subject remains in a state of ineluctable and a-priori

19
For a different evaluation of this fundamental difference between Levinas's and Bakhtin's

conceptions of the relation between the subject and the other see Michael Eskin (2000), who writes

that "while Levinas reiterates the priority of the other, who interpellates me (in the accusative case),

thus enabling me to become an agent, an 'I' (in the nominative case), Bakhtin takes the 'I' as/ the

most fundamental moment in co-existence for granted . . . . In other words, B does not problematize

the initial emergence of the active 'I' by way of the other . . . . the self is always already an actively

experiencing self. . . . Semethically, I indeed owe my existence to an interlocutor; co-existentially, I

am always already an actively experiencing agent." (p. 78, italics at source); Jeffrey T. Nealon

(1998) is even more critical of the Bakhtinian conception of subjectivity which, he suggests, is

ultimately "approporiative" and "voracious" in that it does not allow the same primacy to the other

as does Levinas's (pp. 41-2).

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 24

subjection, Bakhtin's superaddresee is explicitly defined in terms of discourse. For the

superaddresee to exist there has to be a conversation--an address, an addresser, and an

addressee. There has, above all, to be some commonality which would enable the address

and some potential convergence of the interlocutors' appeal to the superaddresee.

As we have seen, both Bakhtin and Levinas develop a non-essentialist conception

of subjectivity, and a non-systematic conception of ethics, predicated in both their cases

on the non-coincidence of the subject with itself and its radical openness to the other. But

it is Bakhtin's insistence on the discursive formation of subjectivity which allows him to

translate these conception of ethics into an affirmation of agency, and a recognition of

commonality and reciprocity which is not in evidence in Levinas's ethical postulate.

Bakhtin's conception of subjectivity is truly phenomenological in that it recognizes the

constitutive role of the other, but at least from 1929 onwards, it remains aware of both the

benign and the malevolent aspects of this role. The Bakhtinian ethical subject—modeled

on what he reads as Dostoevsky's "Copernican revolution"--is invariably present to itself

as yet-to-be, as a task, a transcendence of "is" for the sake of "ought." Oscillating

between vulnerability and resistance, navigating between the appeal of the needy other

and the violence of the oppressive other, as we all do in the real world, it is both all-too-

human and thoroughly humane.

The Bakhtinian conception of ethical subjectivity, as I have attempted to

synthesize it above, is perhaps less radical than Levinas's in that it posits a standard of

arbitration "beyond and above" the participants in the dialogue, but it is also more viable

than Levinas's kenotic conception in that it posits that source of authority as implicit in

the structure of discourse rather than in the Other, and allows for subjective agency and

choice. It is thus in Bakhtin's work that the transition from a vertical to a lateral

orientation is fully accomplished. The ethical in Bakhtin's work is not perceived as

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 25

immanent in the constitution of subjectivity: it is an attitude of "facing" the other in a

dialogic relationship, a position of choice. And making choices is what ethics is all about.
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 26

References

Note: in view of the truncated and complex publication history of Bakhtin's work,

and the intervals between the writing and the publication of his essays, I have provided

the dates of completion and/ or publication of the text in Russian in the initial

parentheses, with the publication dates of the English edition following the details of the

translation.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1919-21/1986). Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Eds. Michael Holquist

and Vadim Liapunov. Trans.Vadim Liapunov. Austin, Texas: University of Texas

Press, 1993.

------ . (1922-24/1977-8). "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity." Art and

Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim

Liapunov. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press,

1990, 4-256.

------ . (1929; 2nd edn., 1963). Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl

Emerson. Intr. Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1984.

------ . (1934-5) “Discourse in the Novel." First published in the Soviet Union in 1972.

In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael

Holquist. Trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of

Texas Press, 1981, 259-422.

------ . (1943-61/ 1992). “From Draft Exercise Notebooks.” Trans.Victoria Clebanov.

Literaturnaya Ucheba, vol. 5, 153-166.

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 27

------ . (1952-3), "The Problem of Speech Genres." In in Speech Genres and Other

Late Essays. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern E.

McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986, 60-102.

------ . (1959-1961). "The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the

Human Sciences." In Speech Genres and other Late Essays. Eds. Caryl

Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern E. McGee. Austin: University of

Texas Press, 1986, 103-131.

------ . (1961)."Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book." In Problems of

Dostoevsky's Poetics (2nd edn. 1963). Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Appendix II, 283-302.

------ . (1970-1971) “From Notes Made in 1970-1971”. In Speech Genres and other Late

Essays. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans.Vern E. McGee.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986, 336-360.

------ . (1974) “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences”, in Speech Genres and Other

Late Essays. Eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans.Vern E. McGee.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986, 159-172.

Brandist, Craig (2002). The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics.

London; Sterling, Virginia: Pluto Press.

Critchley, Simon (1992). The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida & Levinas. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Crowell, Steven G. (2003). "Kantianism and Phenomenology." In The Ethical, eds.

Edith Wyschogrod and Gerald P. McKenny. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Derrida, Jacques (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of

Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York:

Routledge.
 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 28

Emerson, Caryl and Gary Saul Morson (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a

Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna (1995). "Bakhtin's Homesickness: A Late Reply to Julia

Kristeva." Textual Practice, 9 (2), 223-242

Eskin, Michael (2000). Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin,

Mandel'shtam, and Celan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gardiner, Michael (1996). “Alterity and Ethics: A Dialogical Perspective," Theory,

Culture & Society, 13 (2), 121-143.

Handleman, Susan (1993). "Facing the Other: Levinas, Perelman, and Rosenzweig,"

in Summoning: Ideas of the Covenant and Interpretive Theory. Ed. Ellen

Spolsky. NY: Suny Press, 47-70.

Holquist, Michael (1990). Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1947; 2nd edn. 1979/ 1987). Time and the Other. Trans. Richard

A. Cohen. Pittsburg: Duquasne University Press.

------ . (1961/1969). Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alfonso Lingis. Pittsburgh:

Duquesne University Press.

------ . (1974/1981). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso

Lingis. The Hague: Martius Nijhoff..

------ . (1982). Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. Richard A.

Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquasne University Press.

------ . (1982/ 1998). "Philosophy, Justice and Love." Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other.

Translated Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. London: The Althone Press.

Nealon, Jeffrey T. (1998). Alterity Politics: Ethics and Perfomative Subjectivity.

Durham and London: Duke University Press.

 Bakhtin Meets Levinas 29

Pechey, Graham (1999)."Eternity and Modernity: Bakhtin and the Epistemological

Sublime." Critical Essays on Mikhail Bakhtin. Ed. Caryl Emerson. New York:

G.K . Hall & Co, 347-377.

Peperzak Adriaan (1993). To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of

Emmanuel Levinas. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press.

Ponzio, Augusto (1987). “The Relation of Otherness in Bakhtin, Blanchot, Levinas”

Research Semiotique / Semiotic Inquiry, 7 (1), 1-18.

Ricoeur, Paul (1990). Oneself as Another. Trans. Katheleen Blamey. Chicago and

London: The University of Chicago Press.

Robbins, Jill (1999). Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago and London:

The University of Chicago Press.

Zavala, Iris (1989). "Bakhtin and the Third: Communication as Response." Critical

Studies, I (2), 43-63.