Mikhail Bakhtin Quotes
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher of language, literary theorist, and philosophical anthropologist whose work, much of it written in obscurity and exile, transformed twentieth-century literary theory after its rediscovery in the 1960s. Working through long decades of provincial isolation under Stalin, he produced studies of Dostoevsky, Rabelais, and the novel that articulated a philosophy of dialogue in which truth is born between persons rather than within them. The quotes below are attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin, organized by topic.
Browse Mikhail Bakhtin by topic
Mikhail Bakhtin on Knowledge
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“Not all words ... submit equally to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker.”
p. 294 -
“Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker's intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others.”
p. 294
Mikhail Bakhtin on Love
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Attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin:
“To be is to communicate dialogically.”
Mikhail Bakhtin on Time
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Attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin:
“There is neither a first nor a last word; the contexts of dialogue have no limit.”
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“The word ... becomes "one's own" only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions.”
pp. 293-294
Mikhail Bakhtin on Truth
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Attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin:
“Truth is not born nor is it found inside the head of an individual person; it is born between people.”
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Attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin:
“Every word smells of the contexts in which it has lived its life.”
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Attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin:
“The novel is the great dialogic form.”