ogy; the idea in hermeneutics of experience as origin and of meaning and signification as pre-given are identical with relation to Bakhtin as well as the Western thinkers. As such, questions posed and resolutions offered often breathe the same philosophical air, without a full coincidence of thought. Take, for instance, Michel Foucaulfs theory of discursive practices as being expressive of a system repressing the other in his studies of madness, incarceration, sexuality and Mikhail Bakhtin's views on discourse genres as expressive of a struggle of tendencies betwen centrifugal and centripetal forces, between dominant and subversive ideologies (the carnival, for example); or Roland Barthes' and Mikhail Bakhtin's views on (inter) textuality and on the refraction of the ideological sign; of the concept of ideology in Marxism which has been the object of polemics for the past few decades, and Bakhtin's formulation of the 1920s on ideology as being materially inscribed in sign-systems; ofdeconstruc-tion and its 'play of significations' and Bakhtin's polyphonous discourse . ..
The areas for a critical examination of both Bakhtin's theory and post-structuralism are many—both could serve to illuminate each other's grounds. But, strangely enough, these themes remained largely unexplored. What has appeared, instead, is an appropriative discourse based on silences, misrepresentations and reductions, that have "forestalled a genuine dialogue on Bakhtin and his contribution to thinking on culture and a methodology of the human sciences.
Take, for instance, Michael Holquist's view on the difference between deconstruction and Bakhtin (Michael Holquist is the leading disseminator of Bakhtin's views in the USA). He opines that while Derrida insists that no one holds meaning, Bakhtin asserts that we (i.e., the communicating individuals) hold meaning.2 One can speak of a Platonic reflection of a reflection in this rather naive comparison: the dominant American academic appropriation of French thought, the dominant American academic appropriation of Soviet thought, and the reflection of these reflections in Michael Holquist's thought! He fails to even mention the most obvious difference between the two thinkers— that while Derrida formulated his critique ofSaussure from the position of writ-ing and grammatology privileging text over speech (which, according to him, in the Western philosophical tradition is tied to the notion of the 'self-presence' and ofTull-meaning'), Bakhtin's critique was from the position of utterance and speech, of voice and inflection, as expressive of the historically and socially inscribed triadic relationship between the speaker, listener and object of speech involved actively in dialogic responses. For Bakhtin even the written text is riven with silenced intonations and inflections, sometimes so complex that the spoken voice cannot reproduce it.^
110 Numbers 12-13