On contemporary subjectivities: some Mikhail Bakhtin’s contributions

Abstract

This paper aims to reconstruct the concept of subject in part of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work. We consider the concept contributes to present-day debates regarding the discursive and social dimensions of subject constitution. We recover Tatiana Bubnova’s readings regarding voice as a central aspect for the subject’s existence, and dialogue as constitutive of subjectivity. Debates about subject and subjectivity have become main issues, especially since the post-structural turn, with its deconstruction of the modern foundations underlying these concepts and its encouragement of contingent and critic thinking. This way, we are interested in recovering Bakhtin’s perspective of otherness as a view of subjectivity constituted by the other, inhabited by the words of others, and the presence of social relationship as a condition of its possibility and existence. Finally, we intend to establish certain bonds and meaning networks with some postfeminist works concerning the concept of subject that finds in Bakhtin a source of inspiration and a possibility of intertextuality which enriches and deepens postfeminist contributions towards the understanding of contemporary subjectivity.