“Carnival . . . is not a literary phenomenon.” “Symbolic concretely sensuous forms” reminds us of Jean Genet’s “language of flowers” Jacques Derrida writes about in GLAS. “Terror” and fear are also important and relevant politically situational words that will come up repeatedly.. It also recalls the overt and covert inheritance of Neoplatonic symbols Kathleen Raine brings out in her study of William Blake in BLAKE AND TRADITION. All of these again relate to Henry Corbin’s analysis of Avicenna’s visionary recitals:

8. 

They possess, we have already suggested, the interest of showing us the Avicennan philosophy not merely as seriously constructing a spiritual universe whose present meaning for us, men of the modern age, can be found only by recourse to, or by the roundabout way of, a conscious mediation. They teach us its present meaning directly, because they show us that universe not as an abstract magnitude, transcended by our “modern” conceptions, but as the repository of the Image that the man Avicenna carries in himself, as each of us also carries his own. The Image in question is not onethat results from some previous external perception; it is an Image that precedes all perception, an a priori expressing the deepest being of the person, what depth psychology calls an Imago. Each of us carries in himself the Image of his own world, his Imago mundi, and projects it into a more or less coherent universe, which becomes the stage on which his destiny is played out. He may not be conscious of it, and to that extent he will experience as imposed on himself and on others this world that in fact he himself or others impose on themselves. This is also the situation that remains in force as long as philosophical systems profess to be “objectively” established. It ceases in proportion to such an acquisition of consciousness as permits the soul to triumphantly to pass beyond the circles that held it prisoner. And that is the entire adventure related, as a personal experience, in the Recital of Hayy ibn Yaqz
n and the Recital of the Bird. ¶ . . . Philosophical readiness to conceive the universe and intelligible essences is henceforth contemplated by imaginative ability to visualize concrete figures, to encounter “persons.” Once the rupture of plane is consummated, the soul reveals all the presences that have always inhabited it without it’s being aware of them. It reveals its secret; it contemplates itself and tells the story of itself as in search of its kindred, as foreboding a family of beings of light who draw it toward a clime beyond all climes thitherto known . . . The figure of the Active Intelligence, which dominates all this philosophy, reveals its proximity, its solicitude. The Angel individuates himself under the features of a definite person, whose annunciation corresponds to the degree of experience of the soul to which he announces himself: it is through the integration of all its powers that the soul opens itself to the transconscious and anticipates its own reality. ¶ This totality – homo integer – can be expressed only in a symbol. (Henry Corbin, AVICENNA AND THE VISIONARY RECITAL, trans. Trask, Princeton U. P. /Bollingen, 1988, pp. 7-8)

Here is an image of both literature and philosophy, not as abstract disciplines trivialized by their own technique, but an oblique introduction – it cannot be called a confrontation because difference is partially dissolved in identity here – to a living individual person, different and yet the same as oneself.  Something very similar happens in the Imago of Freud’s concept of mourning where the deceased is encysted within the self of the bereaved in an effort to keep them alive. Also, in Soren Kierkegaard’s REPETITION, an Imago is implicitly created of Regina Olson, whom he broke his engagement with, but retained her unchanging image as inspiration to continual unsatisfied but undiscouraged desire that is then transferred to God.

. . . [F]or repetition is a crucial expression for what “recollection” was to the Greeks (Phaedrus, 250, 275a, Phaedo, 73-76, 92, Meno85-86). Just as they taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition . . . Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been, is repeated backward, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy—assuming, of course, that he gives himself time to live and does not promptly at birth find an excuse to sneak out of life again, for example, that he has forgotten something. ¶ Recollection’s love, an author has said (Kierkegaard, EITHER/OR I[Hong’s reference]), is the only happy love. He is perfectly right in that, of course, provided one recollects that initially it makes a person unhappy. Recollection’s love is in truth the only happy love. Like recollection’s love, it does not have the restlessness of hope, the uneasy adventurousness of discovery, but neither does it have the sadness of recollection—it has the blissful security of the moment. Hope is a new garment, stiff and starched and lustrous, but it has never been tried on, and therefore one does not know how becoming it will be or how it will fit. Recollection is a discarded garment that does not fit, however beautiful it is, for one has outgrown it. Repetition is an indestructible garment that fits closely and tenderly, neither binds nor sags. Hope is a lovely maiden who slips away between one’s fingers; recollection is a beautiful old woman with whom one is never satisfied at the moment; repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never wearies, for one becomes weary only of what is new. One never grows weary of the old, and when one has that, one is happy. He alone is truly happy who is not deluded into thinking that the repetition should be something new, for then one grows weary of it. It takes youthfulness to hope, youthfulness to recollect, but it takes courage to will repetition. He who will merely hope is cowardly; he who will merely recollect is voluptuous; he who wills repetition is a man, and the more emphatically he is able to realize it, the more profound a human being he is. But he who does not grasp that life is a repetition and that this is the beauty of life has pronounced his own verdict and deserves nothing better than what will happen to him anyway—he will perish. For hope is a beckoning fruit that does not satisfy; recollection is petty travel money that does not satisfy; but repetition is the daily bread that satisfies with blessing. When existence has been circumnavigated, it will be manifest whether one has the courage to understand that life is a repetition and has the desire to rejoice in it . . . Who could want to be a tablet on which time writes something new every instant or to be a memorial volume of the past? . . . If God himself had not willed repetition, the world would not have come into existence . . . Either he would have followed the superficial plans of hope or hew would have retracted everything  and preserved it in recollection. This he did not do. Therefore, the world continues, and it continues because it is a repetition. Repetition—that is actuality and the earnestness of existence (FEAR AND TREMBLING/REPETION trans. Howard and Edna Hong, Princeton, 1983, pp. 131-3)

Is this not an explicit and realistic program of ‘faith’? Is this not a Nietzschean program? ‘Faith,’ from a standpoint like this, grounded purely in human, mortal, finite realities – the exact opposite of what one normally expects from a believer, is irrefutable and unshakable. It is also purely personal, i.e., “existential solipsism.”

There remain only two solutions for the idealist; either to get rid of the concept of the Other completely and to prove that he is useless to the constitution of my experience, or to affirm the real existence of the Other—that is, to posit a real, extra-empirical communication between consciousnesses. ¶ The first solution is known by the name of solipsism. Yet if it is formulated in conformity with its denomination as the affirmation of my ontological solitude, it is a pure metaphysical hypothesis, perfectly unjustified and gratuitous; for it amounts to saying that outside of me nothing exists and so it goes beyond the limits of the field of my experience. But if it is presented more modestly as a refusal to leave the solid ground of experience and as a positive attempt not to make use of the concept of the Other, then it is perfectly logical; it remains on the level of critical positivism, and although it is opposed to the deepest inclinations of our being, it derives its justification from the contradictions of the notion of Others considered in the idealist perspective. A psychology that wants to be exact and objective, like the “behaviorism” of Watson, is really only solipsism as a working hypothesis. (Sartre, BEING AND NOTHINGNESS, trans. Barnes, Philosophical Library pg. 229, Washington Square 311)

This is discovered as a necessary contradiction, an aporia, in Heidegger’s concept of Mitdasein, ‘being-with.’ On the one hand, all that you are, is inherited from education through the ‘They’ self. In fact you true self can only be the ‘They’ self. And yet on the other hand, your perception as experience, your body as personal and ownmost, pinpoints what you are as absolutely and solipsistically unique but in such a fashion that this Dasein almost is another self!

That about which Angst is anxious reveals itself as that for which it is anxious: being-in-the-world. The identity of that about which and that for which one has Angst extends even to anxiousness itself. For as attunement, anxiousness is a fundamental mode of being-in-the-world. The existential identity of disclosing and what is disclosed so that in what is disclosed the world is disclosed as world, as being-in, individualized, pure, thrown potentiality for being, makes it clear that with the phenomenon of Angst a distinctive kind of attunement has become the theme of our interpretation. Angst individualizes and thus discloses Da-sein as “solus ipse.’ This existential “solipsism,” however, is so far from transposing an isolated subject-thing into the harmless vacuum of a worldless occurrence that it brings Da-sein in an extreme sense precisely before its world as world, and thus itself before itself as being-in-the-world. B&T, Stambaugh 176/M&R 233/SuZ 188

This ties in perfectly both Henry Corbin and Soren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre with Heidegger.

Bakhtin never talks about literature as being literature, a specialized field closed within itself. He is not talking about genre as merely technique of literature. Literature for him is only justified for an existential purpose, for dealing, as he says, with “a special relation with reality.” If one talks about sex and shit, one might disgust the Stalinist censors but one does not politically alarm them. And, unlike the Nazis, the CPSU took “philosophy” and “ideology” very seriously indeed, and with deadly intent. Bakhtin could get away with using those words because, from the Communist ideologue’s point of view, he was harmlessly ‘misusing’ those words to inflate the bogus value of his ‘literary criticism,’ the category Bakhtin seemed to them to be writing in, and gain party approval for his dissertation, which, because of his ‘incompetence,’ he did not gain. When he defended his dissertation RABELAIS AND THE HISTORY OF REALISM in 1946 (he had finished it in 1940), Comrade Terieva “condemned his work for resembling more ‘private research’ full of ‘superfluous references to Saturnalia and phallic cults’ than an objective study of class antagonisms . . .” (Caryl Emerson, THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS OF MIKHAIL BAKHTIN, Princeton, 1997, pg. 95).  “Bakhtin responded in his final statement . . . that his study dealt with one of the world’s most revolutionary writers, that he saw no reason to write ‘what had already been written and spoken,’ that that Comrade Terieva apparently wanted him simply to repeat ‘what she had already studied,’ and that ‘I, as a scholar, can be a revolutionary as well . . . I solved the problem (of Rabelais) in a revolutionary way.’” He meant this literally. Throughout RABELAIS AND HIS WORLD he supposedly was, with his talk of folk, community, commonness, and the insignificance of solipsistic ‘individuality’, incompetently supporting a Marxist ideology when in fact he is proposing an anarchist ideology that, superficially, can, by the stupid, be mistaken for a Communist one!

That even sympathetic and relatively intelligent interpreters misunderstand what he is about is immediately brought up Emerson:

9.  There were also responsible objections raised at the defense, however, by those who appreciated fully the value and originality of Bakhtin’s work. Where is the spiritually serious side of humanism? Why is the great realist François Rabelais cast backward into the Middle Ages and not forward, progressively, into the Renaissance? On what basis can the dissertator claim that medieval carnival or carnival laughter is so carefree and eternally “cheerful”? Why such simplistic binary thinking, which presumes that grotesque realism is solely the property of the masses – when in fact all strata of society (even those Bakhtin excoriates as “official”) can be shown to have indulged delightedly in it? And for that matter why do the common people in Bakhtin’s account only laugh and cavort, when in history they clearly broke their backs with work, suffered, and thirsted to believe? The entire hypothesis of “reduced carnivalization” in subsequent literary epochs struck some examiners as an artificial construct. Can one really leap unproblematically from Rabelasian folkloric fantasy to Gogol’s ambivalent humor or to Dostoyevsky’s tragic vision? ¶ In his final statement, Bakhtin addressed these reservations, although in no sense apologetically. His kindly, aristocratic demeanor – tolerant of others because he was indifferent to their opinions – glimmers beneath the transcript. “I am an obsessed innovator,” he admitted. “Obsessed innovators are rarely understood.” He was deeply gratified . . . by the support he had received and grateful for the chance to respond to objections. Yes, in his thesis (far too short for the task he had in mind) perhaps he had exaggerated and simplified cultural traditions . . . “I did not present Rabelais in the atmosphere of the French Renaissance  . . . because . . . so much had already been done . . . In any future monograph . . . he would balance the record with attention to Rabelais the humanist. But . . . the gothic and the grotesque had fared so poorly in literary scholarship . . . that in his study he had resolved to “catch existence in the process of becoming” . . . As regards laughter, Bakhtin hastened to assure his audience: “I do not in the least mean to imply that medieval laughter is cheerful, carefree, and joyous laughter.” In carnival, laughter and death are intertwined; death and pain are everywhere to be found and are grimly real, only death never has the final word. “laughter is a weapon like fists and sticks.” But unlike those later two weapons, which can be wielded effectively in anger and in dread, laughter must be absolutely fearless; and for precisely this reason it is progressive, pointed forward toward the Renaissance. “Laughter liberates us from fear, and this work of laughter . . . is an indispensable prerequisite for Renaissance consciousness. In order to look at the world soberly, I must cease to be afraid. In this, laughter played a most serious role. No, Rabelaisian realism is not degraded, dirty, or an insult to consciousness; it is, on the contrary, a forerunner of all objective critical consciousness. Of course the common people do not only laugh; they have many lives. “But this is the life that interested me, it is deeply progressive and revolutionary . . .” ¶ Despite these assurances at the defense, Bakhtin did not alter the text of his dissertation in the “more balanced,” humanistic direction indicated before seeking a publisher. (Emerson, pp. 95-96)

And who for Bakhtin is the primary expositor of Menippean satire in modern times throughout his works including dually valid aspects and mirror play of meanings, always putting in doubt any ‘proper’ point of view? Fyodor Dostoyevsky.