What Could the “Great Time” Mean?

Abstract

The Great Time is present in Bakhtin’s conception of culture and literature and in his philosophical anthropology. Taken as a metaphor, the concept could be understood in a wide range of meanings: tradition, virtual future, history, literary and intellectual history, memory in its broadest sense, an onthological level of existence, transcendence, etc. The Great Time seems to be related to Bakhtin’s central idea about personal responsibility, rooted in the concrete situation of the act (postupok). From this point of view, the concept implies the presence of a “third” in communication or in the unfinished existential dialogue. The position of this “third” (a polysemic concept itself: people, the reader, the future, God) in dialogue always occurs from a certain outsidedness or exotopy, which allows a value judgement of the act and which goes further than its concrete and social situation. Thus, in a certain way the “third” is a posture from which it is possible to understand the act as transcendence. Through my experience as a scholar and professor of Hispanic Literature and Latin American thinking, I have witnessed the relevance of Bakhtin’s anthropological conception.