Forms of Un-Ownness (Inauthenticity): Other in Bakhtin and Heidegger

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Dmitry Bosnak’s research at the Jordan Center involves a comparative examination of Heidegger’s and Bakhtin’s phenomenological projects. Along with numerous correlations between these projects, otherness is one of the obvious discrepancies. However, a plain dismissal of Heidegger’s philosophy as uninterested in the other and the view of Bakhtin as focused on the other do not hold. Analysis of his texts, primarily “Being and Time,” indicate Heidegger’s strong intention to exile others and to reduce otherness to extreme levels of abstraction. A comparison with Bakhtin’s phenomenology of otherness in his early works, notably “Author and Hero,” helps introduce significant distinctions in the notion “das Man,” which Heidegger presents as a unified phenomenon, and to demonstrate the limitations of this notion.

Dmitry Bosnak received his doctoral degree in Russian literature from the Linguistics University of Nizhny Novgorod. He taught Russian and European literatures at the Linguistics University and the Higher School of Economics in Russia. He has engaged in exploration of Russian literature from philosophical perspectives, focusing on such topics as Ressentiment, aesthetic experience, conceptualizations of will and love, phenomenological perspectives on transformative experience, the eluding boundary between humanity and animality. His research has been strongly influenced by the phenomenological ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin. In 2011-12, he was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University investigating the reception of Bakhtin in North America. His current research focuses on the phenomenology of the event, and particularly on comparative analysis of Heidegger and Bakhtin. In the winter of 2024-25, he had a research residence in Paris examining the Francophone reception of Heidegger’s phenomenology, funded by a fellowship from the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme.