The return of poetics. Julia Kristeva vs Mikhail Bakhtin

Abstract

The article offers an analysis of the concept of “intertext” that has been put forward by Julia Kristeva in her work “The Destruction of Poetics” in comparison with Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of a universal context and “infinite dialogue”. It is concluded that Kristeva incorrectly perceived Bakhtin’s thoughts about context and dialogue, which are personalistic in nature in contrast to Kristeva’s impersonal one based on the Freudian-driven “It” and social factors of the “intertext”. The article analyzes the theoretical basis of this concept, including the crisis in literary theory in the 1970s–1980s where there was frustration by the European and Russian scientific community in the universalism of binary oppositions. In this regard, the issue of overcoming the theoretical difficulties of literary aesthetics with the help of the ternary model of aesthetic communication (“metalinguistics”), which was developed by Bakhtin in his works since the 1930s and was not heeded by Kristeva, has not yet been mastered in modern philological science. This concept is based on the idea of aesthetics as metaethics, which is built up in the process of textual communication over simple binary ethical exchange. The article suggests that the use of this idea of a ternary (metalinguistic) construction of the communicative field of a literary work can significantly advance the solution of many problems in theoretical poetics, in particular, reveal new ways for linking the discursive-textual and axiological fields of a literary-fiction text into one whole.