ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with participation, misrecognition, and desire in the process of people thinking dialogically. The argument begins with Alain Badiou’s fruitful idea that the other is immanent in our own identity and we need to displace ourselves imaginatively to see how this is so. From Badiou the discussion moves to Lacan’s thinking about our persistent, imaginary misrepresentations of the other, fueled by desire that is endlessly reduplicated. Gadamer’s theories about prejudgement, the “fusion of horizons”, and how art is dialogical are used to organize these points in relation to my central theme. Gadamer is complemented by Bakhtin, who also argues that art is dialogical. But Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque adds a further dimension to the discussion by showing how unruly desire opens up new spaces for communication. Dialogue therefore is subversive, risky, open-ended. A reading of the Sir Urré episode in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur exemplifies and confirms these points.
