SOURCE: “‘The Incomparable Monster of Solipsism’: Bakhtin and Merleau-Ponty.” In Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words, edited by Michael Mayerfeld Bell and Michael Gardiner, pp. 128-44. London: SAGE Publications, 1998.

In the following essay, Gardiner explores affinities between the work of Merleau-Ponty and that of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Not only do we have a right to assert that others exist, but I should be inclined to contend that existence can be attributed only to others, and in virtue of their otherness, and that I cannot think of myself as existing except in so far as I conceive of myself as not being the others: and so as other than them. I would go so far as to say that it is of the essence of the Other that he exists. I cannot think of him as other without thinking of him as existing. Doubt only arises when his...