ABSTRACT
This book of essays records a twelve-year exchange in a much longer conversation with Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (18951975) – a conversation which began, indeed, when he was still alive, and which has now lasted half of my life. Given his own overriding contention that dialogue is a much broader phenomenon than the face-to-face, turn-taking interlocution which conventionally goes by that name, it scarcely matters that Bakhtin and I trod the same earth for thirty-five years without ever meeting; or that if, by some extraordinary quirk of fate, we had met, the Babelic confusion of tongues which put Russian in his mouth and English in mine would have forestalled understanding. If a certain deference to my more sceptical readers makes me reluctant to speak of a plane beyond the punctualities of time and space which will find both of us together again – and of the luminous transparency of understanding which, one trusts, that meeting will yield – then I have to say that those among such readers who have never (if only momentarily) suspended their disbelief in the afterlife will not have reaped the considerable philosophical rewards of placing oneself uncompromisingly on the other side of the known, and will have missed something quite crucial in their reading of Bakhtin. For the philosopher himself, such spiritual acrobatics yield the deepest understanding, and he expects of us a skill like his own in their execution.
