ABSTRACT
Who or what is Mikhail Bakhtin? Two of the monographs we have on him agree on an identity: Bakhtin is a philosopher. The compliment, however well meant, is lethal, and this chapter (if it does nothing else) will contest not only that identity but also any other that might be offered. For Todorov, Bakhtin belongs to the ‘intellectual family’ of existentialism.1 Tucked away as it is in a footnote, this affirmation might escape our notice if it were not implicitly announced in the bold script of a subtitle borrowed from Martin Buber: The Dialogical Principle. Bakhtin in Todorov’s rendering becomes a proto-existentialist distinguished from all others by his elaboration of a theory of discourse, or what Bakhtin himself calls a ‘translinguistics’. Even this is doubtful when we think of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s grounding of language in intersubjectivity and his contestation of dominant linguistic theories very much on their own terrain. Bakhtin is neither a phenomenologist with a flair for semiotics nor (like Emile Benveniste) a linguist who leavens and widens his technical interests with a little phenomenology. Rather than affirming an identity we should turn our attention to his specificity as a thinker, and we can do this by saying that language for him takes place not in the neutral space of ‘communication’ but in a
charged and irreducibly sociopolitical space of its own endless making and remaking. It will not do to deny the existentialist and the semiotician in Bakhtin, but merely to add to each other these two moments of his thinking, without that third dimension modifying both, is to throw away the subversive potential of these Western responses to the twentieth-century crises of (respectively) the subject and of representation. Bakhtin then enters the history of ideas as a character with an honoured minor role in the Western narrative of human freedom.
