Decentering the Dialogic: Lacan with Bakhtin

Abstract

This paper will argue that the structure of Dostoevsky’s poetics is constituted around the phenomenology of shame and the gaze. Dostoevsky should be read not only inter-textually or as historical object but critically, with Lacanian psychoanalysis and the European philosophical canon. 1 Positioning Dostoevsky at the limit separating the theological tradition and European philosophical positivism, our analysis will present him as a precursor to psychoanalytic and phenomenological concepts of subjectivity of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this sense Dostoevsky with Lacan can be used to re-frame and situate Bakhtinian concepts of the dialogical; a re-reading that makes more explicit the radical ideas inherent in Bakhtin’s work but at once problematises some of these ideas in terms of the implicit structure of the subject and inter-subjectivity.