PHILOSOPHER IN THE CITY: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE PLACE Article 1. Mikhail Bakhtin
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2019-3-43-61
A series of articles in which the author poses the problem of the connection between the life and the biography of the philosopher with the life and biography of the city begins with this work. Through the identification of event links between the biography of a particular philosopher’s person and the places in the cities in which his life took place, the author proposes to examine the problem of how the place’s autobiography is formed. The author considers the specifics of philosophical autobiographies through the prism of the biography of the city. The article proposes a working model for the reconstruction of the author’s habitat. The reconstruction scheme is in an attempt to restore the author’s habitat and events of his life by highlighting layers consisting of socalled “units” and “organizations”. Units of reconstruction are artifacts (things, objects, material objects, results of activity), signs (texts, symbolic structures), values and meanings, events and actions. Artifacts form such organization as urban infrastructures. Signs form a city text. Values and meanings form the memory of the city. Events and actions constitute everyday life in the city. Each author, as a result, creates his own trajectory of life, his autobiography, consisting of these units, which are then restored and reconstructed by researchers. Each specific biography of a particular philosopher will be considered in the language of the proposed construct. This article discusses the biography of M. M. Bakhtin. It is shown that the sources of Bakhtin’s biography (artifacts, texts, etc.) are very scarce. The texts are fragmentary and incomplete. Events and actions are hidden and difficult to recover. Values and meanings, of course, have to be reconstructed. As a result, Bakhtin, as an author, confirms with his biography his own thesis about the outsidedness and unfinalizability of the author’s thoughts and actions. The philosopher himself tried in every possible way to disappear from the geographical map of the territory of residence, forcing researchers to engage more in the interpretation and reconstruction of the author’s life than in analyzing the real facts of his life. At the same time, even the disappearing event point, which Bakhtin as an author is for subsequent researchers, clearly shows his discrepancy with himself and also the auto-reflective, event-related nature of the philosophers’ autobiography in principle.
Keywords: autobiography, philosophical autobiography, memory visualization, city, place, artifact, event, city text
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Issue: 3, 2019
Series of issue: Issue 3
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 43 — 61
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