Deed, Otherness and Love in Bakhtin and Peirce

This paper evidences the philosophical orientation subtending Bakhtin’s research on the interpretation of the literary text. If we separate this philosophical basis from his writings, it is easy to interpret him wrongly as a literary critic, as in fact has been the case. This implies not understanding the sense of his dedication to literary discourse. Publication of his early works, in some cases in recent times (between the second half of the 1970s and the second half of the 1980s) has greatly contributed to grasping this “sense”. In the first place it is a question of understanding Bakhtin’s “philosophy of the act, or deed” passing through a study of the relation between author and hero and therefore to his monograph on Dostoevsky (1st ed. 1929, 2nd ed. 1963) and ultimately to the study of the carnivalesque and the grotesque body through the works of Rabelais (as from the 1940s, even though Bakhtin’s Rabelais was only published in 1965). Once the philosophical framework of Bakhtin’s discourse and of his dialogism is made to emerge (the topic of the first part of this text), it is possible to relate Bakhtin’s conception to Peirce’s (the topic of the second part). This relation not only concerns their conception of the sign as they have proposed it. It also concerns the fact that traceable in both is a strong attention for the problem of otherness, listening and for the relation with the other in terms of “love”. Both in the cosmic vision delineated in Peirce and in what Bakhtin calls the “great experience” – juxtaposing it to the small and short-sighted experience of the individual subject assumed to be autonomous and separate from others – love becomes the essential relation not only for the human world, not only for life, but for the universe in its entirety (Peircean agapasm).