Dialogue, responsibility and literary writing. Mikhail Bakhtin and his Circle

Mikhail Bakhtin cannot be discussed without discussing his friends and collaborators forming the Bakhtin Circle. The name Bakhtin itself announces a polyphony of different voices and viewpoints, internally to Bakhtin’s own voice and externally, all evidencing the word’s capacity for dialogism and otherness, the possibility of cohabitation and interference among different voices in the same word, the propensity for participative listening, ultimately the inevitability of responsiveness/responsibility toward the other, that is, the other’s singularity. The name “Bakhtin” or, better, the expression “Bakhtin Circle,” offers a concrete perspective for a world constructed in terms of multiplicity, diversity, and hospitality toward the other. This essay presents some characteristic aspects of Bakhtinian philosophy, keeping account of the writings collected in the 2014 bilingual volume Opere 1919–1930, presented by the renowned Italian Bakhtin scholar Augusto Ponzio.