ABSTRACT
The last thoughts written down by Mikhail Bakhtin before his death turn not on the meaning of life but rather on the life of meaning. The gesture is characteristic: the ‘meaning of life’ could not be other than a monological ‘transcription’ and generalization of that force field of the singular and situated which (for him) is life as it is lived and endlessly becomes. The whole internally open-ended work of his life is brought to an external end with the words ‘great time’, by which he signifies the immortality of all meanings, the endless circulation and return of semantic energies, the interaction of live contexts in infinite dialogue across hundreds and even thousands of years. ‘Great time’ is a concept that should speak quite directly to us as we begin the second Christian millennium in a world where supposedly forgotten themes and narratives are being revived or
newly inflected, not just by single writers in theory but by whole collectivities in practice.
