ABSTRACT

A sense of communal solidarity, of organic participation in the life of others, bestows its own mode of authority and truth on the narrative of life. But that source of communal authority which operates, for example, in epic discourse is (at least according to Bakhtin’s view in ‘Discourse in the novel’) no less ‘monologic’ or metaphysical than the overtly religious construction.27 It is precisely this problem of grounding, this metaphysical vacuum which, I suggest, has enabled the return of the superaddressee, the ultimate other, into Bakhtin’s last essays. He, too, like Dostoevsky, his hero, was amongst the disinherited.