The Question of the Author in Bakhtin

Abstract

I would like to reflect on the problem of the author in Bakhtin, who is subject to numerous sieges throughout his work: as character, as ideologist of the architectonics, as masked voice, as polyphonic ear, as interlocutor in chronotopized dialogue. I propose to explore these positions from the relationship between the intellectual history of the author-thinker Bakhtin and his theoretical notion of author (authorship), which, although it acquires different modulations, is always the question of the subject, his mode of existence and consciousness, the production of different forms of knowledge of himself and of the world through intersubjective relations. With Bakhtin we witness a process of transformation of the civilizing subject of Modernity and his replacement by an ethical subject of discourse. I conclude with a brief comparison with the text by Barthes on the death of the author.