Bakhtin’s discovery and appropriations: in Russia and in the West

This article sets itself a twofold task. On the basis of recently published scholarship, it wishes to revisit the history of Bakhtin’s discovery in Russia and the West since the 1960s; but it also intends to offer a tentative answer to the question: ‘What did Bakhtin discover as a thinker’? The two dimensions, captured in the ambiguity of the genitive - ‘Bakhtin’s discovery’ - are closely interrelated. In a very significant sense, what we perceive to be Bakhtin’s discoveries as a thinker and a theorist is a dynamic target rather than a fixed apparatus. As I try to demonstrate through a plethora of examples, Bakhtin’s discoveries and the lessons we draw from them have been articulated differently at different historical junctures and in different cultural settings; the Bakhtin we see is a fluctuating image, resulting from superimposed perspectives involving growth, modification, loss, and a complex adjustment of meaning, as his body of writing travels across time and traditions and meets inherited patterns of reasoning. Bakhtin’s discoveries are thus not a reliable supply of knowledge or wisdom; they rather derive from the elusive, sometimes blurred, and never quite finished work of mediation and translation.[1] Equally important, the optics we apply towards Bakhtin in discerning his contributions as a thinker is affected by the stories of his discovery at home and abroad. Processes that look as awkward time-lag or distortion are often marks of intense appropriation and a high impact factor in disguise. Over time, we realise that the very narratives employed in telling and re-enacting the story of Bakhtin’s discovery in Russia and the West are saturated with the cultural and ideological heteroglossia which he came to analyse in his writings. In tracing some of these narratives, I hope to arrive gradually at a Bakhtin, whose legacy is the function of multiple historical articulations, a thinker in transit, a theorist subject to dialogue.