Abstract

Among the various appropriations and discussions of M.M. Bakhtin’s work, his ‘philosophy of the everday’ has received increasing recognition in Western scholarship that has complemented his reputation as a literary theorist, aesthetician, and linguist. For example, some critics have suggested that Bakhtin’s work on literature springs from his understanding of the novel as a ‘transcendental metaphor’ for life. Others have attempted to adapt Bakhtin’s work on literature and its emancipatory practical orientation to critical social theory. Such interpretive endeavors might be valid in their respective contexts. However, they in effect obscure the fact that Bakhtin starts his intellectual career as a phenomenologist intent on giving a non-aesthetic explanation of the world, i.e., as human beings experience it through cognition and practical action prior to the mediation of art. In one of his earliest pieces, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin sets out to advance the foundations of a prima philosophia, a philosophical ontology that would explain human existence through categories of being rather than through those of representation. No matter how much of Bakhtin’s early work draws on the legacy of other thinkers, such an intention, unequivocally expressed, testifies to his investment in the philosophy of the real, the practical, and the everyday. In Bakhtin’s early essays, the human being—the figure around which his whole philosophy of the 1920’s revolves—is explicitly portrayed as a living, breathing individual and is carefully distinguished from a literary ‘hero’.