Their relationship to the Western philosophic tradition is very different: Bakhtin in contrast to Derrida, found Socrates to be one of the most fascinating examples of carnival and dialogicity,a philosopher-midwife of truth. While Derrida's critique of linguistics remained within the parameters ofSaussurian theory, Bakhtin had done so from the position of utterance and discourse genres in their dialogical interrelationship with each other.4 To take up a few more examples of this emergent trend in Western studies on Bakhtin, some critics (for explicit or implicit political reasons) privilege a set of texts (parts of which are yet to be published) ofBakhtin's earliest writings that are close to neo-Kantian thought and view the rest of the works written over a period of four decades through this prism. Others deride the text written under the name of P. Medvedev and V. Voloshinov on the grounds that the exposed 'Marxism' of these texts was a convenient garb donned for political reasons since Bakhtin was essentially a religious thinker : Marxist terms, are however, most present in Bakhtin's books from this period as a kind of convenient . . . flag under which to advance his own views : if the Christian word had to take on Soviet flesh, it has to clothe itself in ideological disguise.5 While it is true that the explicit Marxist terminology used in the texts of the latter half of the 1920s was not often used in the later period, the concepts formulated were to remain with Bakhtin throughout his life. They have also decades later re-entered the arena of Marxist polemics on language, literature and ideology. The theories of the critique of the abstract objectivism of Saussure's linguistic theory, the refraction of the ideological sign, the reformulation of Freud's concepts of conscious-unconscious as official and unofficial ideology, the very concept of ideology as it was formulated with an insight rare for the period, only prove that this period of writing was essential for Bakhtin to radically rethink his earlier position on language, literature and philosophy. Yet other critics deduce or derive his formulations from Formalism — of having 'rectified' the formalist 'mistake of ignoring "history" and ideology' (for instance. Tony Bennefs Formalism and Marxism that contains an otherwise interesting analysis). Or else, Bakhtin is pushed into the relativist position of an either-or discourse, when only alteri'ty prevails since belief in metalanguage and metacritique is lost, a situation that is said to mark the post-modern condition (David Carroll, The Alterity of Discourse : Form, History and the Question of the Political in M.M. Bakhtin', Diacritics, Summer, 1983). As opposed to this dominant trend of criticism of appropriation there also exists a criticism of dialogue Allon Whites, 'Bakhtin, Sociolinguistics,' Deconstruction' in Theory of Reading, (ed.) F. Gloversmith, Harvester Press, Sussex, 1984; Terry Eagleton's examination of the contrasting attitudes of Benjamin Journal of Arts & Ideas 111