Maurizio Lazzarato: Dialogism and Polyphony

Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the most important and most original philosophers of the twentieth century. Due to the Soviet repression that persecuted him from the end of the twenties onwards, his work remains poorly known. Bakhtin is commonly classed as a literary critic and linguist, but, as he himself affirmed: ‘I am a philosopher’. His work has yet to be investigated from this angle. Bakhtin only worked under acceptable conditions between 1919 and 1929. Even during this short period, however, he was not able to publish all that he wished to because of the communist censorship. His collaborators, Medvedev and Volonisov, were murdered in the midst of the Stalinist purges – the first in prison and the second in a camp – whilst Bakhtin himself was spared on the grounds of his chronic illness and sent into exile in Kazakhstan, from 1929 to 1936. We have thus lost, due to the numerous changes in his places of exile, two ‘philosophical’ books of which only a few dozen pages remain. The work of what will later come to be called the Bakhtin ‘circle’ was banned. It was only at the end of the sixties that he was rehabilitated (together with Medvedev and Volonisov) and his writings were once again made available. We can thus say that the Russian revolution crushed this new image of thought which, in my view, was far more faithful to the event of the revolution than the intellectual misery of Leninism and Trotskyism – the only things we inherited from this great upheaval. Bakhtin’s philosophy can still speak to us because it poses the problem of the relationship between life and culture, between life and art, a problem that traversed the entire beginning of the century, and the twenties in particular. The solution given by Bakhtin to this problem is markedly distinct from the solution of the ‘avant-gardes’.