“CREATING CONSCIOUSNESS”, OR MIKHAIL BAKHTIN BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

Three things are investigated in the present article: first, the general situation in the so-called Bakhtin studies, East and West; secondly, a possible new approach to Bakhtin’ thinking in the context of the “non-Bakhtinian” ideological and scientific atmosphere after the end of the new times, or the Modernity; thirdly, some preliminary commentary is given to Bakhtin’s notion of authorship, or the “creating consciousness”. Consequently, the first part of the article is a discussion of the disparity between Bakhtin’s world-wide popularity and the general problematiicity of his “influence”. The second part is an attempt to investigate some possibility of “another beginning” in the humanities in general and in Bakhtin studies in particular. While a possibility of creative future, or the “new”, doesn’t seem to exist within the horizon of the present, it is not the present, then, but the creative past of the previous epochs is likely to hermeneutically produce possibilities to enrich our creative potential in the modus of “future-in-the-past”. The last part of the article demonstrates a possibility of “another beginning” elucidating Bakhtin’s concept of authorship as a “creating consciousness”. In the Bakhtinian thinking, a creating author, as well as an active person, is not so much existential or monological, but, rather, grotesque and dialogical. Authorship as the “creating consciousness”seems to overcome the ideal of autonomy typical for the Modernity by his alternative principle of the “autonomous participation or participating autonomy” in life, in art, and in science.