The answer to question: where did Bakhtin come from?

In this article the old question in Bakhtin studies: “Where did Bakhtin come from?” is analyzed against the systematic-historical background. The question is being approached with the concept of the “paradigm shift”, this time not on the sphere of natural sciences (as in T. Kuhn's book about scientific revolution), but in the sphere of philosophy and the human studies, i. e. epistemology in the humanities. The new European revolution in the fields of historical experience, during the First World War and after it (the so-called “one hundred's decade”), seems to have been the historical “chronotope” of M. Bakhtin's own specific turn in philosophy, primarily in ontology; this is the context, I believe, the Russian thinker actually “came from” as a philosopher. In this sense, Bakhtin might be seen and thought as “the only one among the many”, as Sergey Averintsev once called him. From this point of view, the young Bakhtin's project of the paradigm shift in prima philosophia, his text Toward a Philosophy of the Act (1921/22) is looked upon as a specifically individual and nationally unique variation of what M. Theunissen much later called, in his monumental book Der Andere, “social ontology” as the modern (existential) form of the first philosophy. In this sense, Bakhtin, as well as his Western contemporaries put to question the “fatal theoreticism” of the philosophy of the New Times, taking what he called participative thinking as an opposition not to theory, but to “theoroticism”.