HOW TO SEE THE SELF (CO-MOVE THE OTHER?)

CONCEPTS OF AUTHOR IN MICHEL FOUCAULT AND MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

Abstract

Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault are figures often invoked to discuss the author in literary theory. However, the two approaches are distinct. While for Bakhtin the author is an aesthetic principle, for Foucault he is a function. This article reconstructs these divergences, showing that Bakhtin, unlike Foucault, distinguishes aesthetic exploitation from biographical configuration, author-creator from author-person. I locate the fundamental distinctions in their notions of author in the way these two thinkers view the “other.” If the “fear of subjectivation” makes Foucault a pessimist in relation to the other, in Bakhtin the notion of interaction between two consciousnesses as the basis of all human relations highlights the expectation of goodwill towards the other. Thus, while Foucault's concept of authorship results from a search to free the self from the other that subjugates it (placing them in opposing camps), in Bakhtin the author is rather a search to complete the self in the other that frees it (from solipsism). One authorship, negative, is of confrontation; the other, positive, is of encounter.