Abstract

The article engages Bakhtin’s corpus with Nietzschean ideas in order to draw out critical resources for the social theory of ‘community’. It begins by considering both thinkers’ debt to neo-Kantianism, and proceeds to relate the ‘will to power’ to Bakhtin’s early intersubjective phenomenology of intentional acts. This interpretation is then extended to Bakhtin’s conception of art, where aesthetics stands in tensile relation to ethics in the exercise of authorial will. Bakhtin’s later work might be seen as elaborating more complex terms for describing will and event, now as composite embodiments of multiple intentions within art, discourse and language, thus suggesting a novel approach to ‘communality’ in modern social life.