ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses increasingly on the implications of the fact that Mikhail Bakhtin's model of self-other relations, while not restricted to literature, depends at the same time on literature for its exposition. Eventness, answerability, embodiment, outsideness, finalization and unfinalizability, and architectonics are all indispensable to the Bakhtinian view of the world and the text; they are also, as is immediately clear, quite unfamiliar to those interested in philosophy as much as to those primarily interested in literature. The chapter outlines, indeed, the basic 'architectonics' of Bakhtin's model of self-other relations, a discussion that will necessarily involve consideration of more familiar, if perhaps no less difficult, concepts being and the self. The full implications of Bakhtin's architectonics of being, as well as the stakes involved in ignoring them, can be focused by examining the productive contradictions implied by the concepts of finalization and unfinalizability.
