Toward a philosophy of the act

Rescued in 1972 from a storeroom in which rats and seeping water had severely damaged the fifty-year-old manuscript, this text is the earliest major work (1919-1921) of the great Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Toward a Philosophy of the Act contains the first occurrences of themes that occupied Bakhtin throughout his long career. The topics of authoring, responsibility, self and other, the moral significance of "outsideness," participatory thinking, the implications for the individual subject of having "no-alibi in existence," the relation between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse - all are broached here in the white heat of discovery. This is the "heart of the heart" of Bakhtin, the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, "the given" and "the created" that forms the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism. A special feature of this work is Bakhtin's struggle with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Put very simply, this text is an attempt to go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative. Bakhtin raises issues of cultural relativity, the situatedness of knowledge, and the relation of literary theory to moral philosophy that remain as challenging as when they were first written. Toward a Philosophy of the Act will be important reading for scholars across the humanities as they grapple with the increasingly vexed relationship between aesthetics and ethics.