Sezione 'Comparative analysis' (pp. 173-183) di Di Martino E, Perri A, The Westernization of an (academic) hero. Bakhtin, translation ethics and the loss of 'Easterness'

Starting with a review of the Eastern-Western debate on Bakhtin’s role as the “real” author of some seminal books published at the end of the 1920s, this contribution will focus on the translation of some extracts from K filosofii postupka and Marksizm i filosofija jazyka. Osnovnye problemy sociologičeskogo metoda v nauke o jazike, based on the conviction that dialogism only occurs as a vague appeal to otherness in Bakhtin’s early philosophical works and in the almost contemporary writings on aesthetics. It appears in its fully developed form in Vološinov’s book of 1929. Whereas most Italian and North-American interpreters find an evident continuity in Bakhtin’s work, we argue here that the absence of a dialogical principle before the decidedly Marxist argument developed by Vološinov is a strong cue that Bakhtin himself may have taken up the idea of the internal dialectic of discourse and the opposing contexts of dialogue sequences from Vološinov, filtering them of the original Marxist framework and reframing them in his own existentialist and ethical perspective. The Italian academia, a metaphorical ‘buffer zone’ between a European “centre” and Bakhtin’s Eastern “peripheral” tradition, may actually be regarded as the architect of the current “Westernization” of the dialogic Hero.