ABSTRACT
A similar distinction is made in ‘Toward a philosophy of the act’, a fragment of what might have been the introduction to the monumental philosophical project Bakhtin had in mind in the 1920s. Bakhtin writes of the irreducible difference between aesthetic seeing (based on ‘outsideness’), and the ‘world that is correlated with me’ (I-for-myself) which is ‘fundamentally and essentially incapable of becoming part of an aesthetic architectonic’. Against the narrativized conception of the subject which emerges from ‘Author and hero’, Bakhtin writes of the need to resist this ‘temptation of aestheticism’, the inclination to act out a conception of oneself through the eyes of the other, which must be refused by the intensely situated, participative, and answerable subject.26
