Докса (Dec 2017)
DOSTOEVSKY’S NON-COINCIDENT SELF: THE SUBJECT OF JUDGMENT IN THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
Abstract
The article deals with the fundamental complexity and controversy of the non-coincident self concept in the Dostoevsky“s novel “Brothers Karamazov”. Theoretical and philosophical investigation of the subject of judgment“s category is proposed. One of the guiding conceptual frameworks for the novel then is an articulation of true judgment: the possibility of sitting in judgment on the other, and the nature of the subject who is being judged. It is emphasized that the novel’s dominant man under judgment is Dmitri Karamazov. The article points to the contrast between the official and unofficial judgments thus broadly affirms the polar categories of falsity and truth. It is argued that this contrast enacts a familiar Western metaphysical paradigm: truth is aligned with the private, the interior, and the familial; falsity is aligned with the official, the public, and the bureaucratic. In the space of the private, real communication can occur as interiority is exposed to interiority. The problem of non-coincident self and subject of judgment in the “Brothers Karamazov” is considered in the light of basic difference in the Levinasian and Bakhtinian readings of Dostoevsky. Bakhtin believes that the subject escapes this tautology by being more than the perception of him or her by outside eyes. The Levinasian conception of non-coincidence revolves around a disjunction between what might be called levels of subjectivity. The subject is himself and that which has himself – the Levinasian subject is that which takes itself as its own content. The Bakhtinian subject is that which exceeds the others’ grasps. At the same time the Bakhtinian and Levinasian understandings of the subject both insist on the point that the subject is non-coincident with himself The article takes into account the contemporary theoretical approaches of to the Dostoevsky“s studies: Gary L. Browning ( Zosima’s “secrets of renewal”), M. Goldstein (position of a hypothetical man of “advanced ideas”), C. Emerson’s reading in “Zosima’s “Mysterious Visitor”: Again Bakhtin on Dostoevsky, and Dostoevsky on Heaven and Hell”.
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