BAKHTIN OUR CONTEMPORARY

My contribution draws on the tenuous retrospective assessment of Bakhtin's theoretical legacy, consistent with a wide array of epistemological agendas, that "interpreted" him in all the possible meanings of this word. It emphasizes Bakhtin's early concerns for the axiomatic cooperation between aesthetics, theology, ethics and science, from his first important study Art and Answerability (1919) through the early seventies, unveiling the top-down dynamic of his thought which took off from anthropology and ethics towards cultural theory and linguistics rather than the other way around. The very core of his system, the most diversely interpreted and the most frequently misunderstood concept, remains the "dialogue" now almost embodied by him. As defined by Bakhtin, dialogism is a theatrical performance implying three main instances: a speaker, his targeted audience and a transcendental addressee. Bakhtin's theoretical legacy legitimates a phenomenology of dialogism, apparently rooted in the text, but pointing to much wider horizons.