Dialogism as Non-Finalized Concept of Truth. The 20th-Century Literature and Its Logic of Inconclusiveness
Keywords:
Bakhtin, Spanos, de Man, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, dialogue, otherness, dialogism (Bakhtin), truth as becoming and Baudelairian modernity, modernist and postmodernist logic of inconclusiveness, theme of existence and authenticity in modernismAbstract
The Bakhtinian concept of dialogue with its inherent quality of conflict and contradicting, i.e. the quality implying the inscribed space for otherness as something different and opposing, was eagerly accepted in the recent theoretical and philosophical debates, because of its closeness to poststructuralist views on truth. Dialogism as a notion implies awareness of competing views on something and consequently suggests the presence of relativized, de-privileged truth of an object. In other words, it involves de(con)struction of an authoritative or absolute word about it. Being established in the philosophy of concreteness, the concept of dialogue opens a new approach to the problem of truth and its certainty, implying a non-finite character of truth, a multiplicity of focuses on it, a notion of its inexhaustiveness, i.e. an immense, boundless wealth of being. The poststructuralist notion of undecidability is close to Bakhtin’s views on cognition. Discussing the literature of the 20th century and its logic of inconclusiveness, the concept of dialogue could justify itself as a very precise and intelligible tool when conceptualising the complex and contradictory reality of its poetics. As dialogue implies the truth as becoming (German Werden), the art of modernism and postmodernism grounded in the consciousness of de-totalized truth, could well be explained by using this concept.References
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