[Xmca-l] Re: Voloshinov or Bakhtin? Stylometric analysis

[David Kellogg]

One other comment on Seve. He's quite wrong to describe early Bakhtin as
Slavophilic: Bakhtin was far more interested in the neo-Kantians and in
Husserl, and later on Cassirer. These are not writers who occupy a central
place for Slavophiles.

This is important, because the epigones of Bakhtin--Gachev, and above all
Kuzhinov--have tried to erect something quite Slavophilic around his name.
Kuzinov in particular has espoused the anti-Semitic theory that the
Kazhars, who converted to Judaism, were responsible for all deviations from
the true path of Russian philosophy. This kind of idiocy is growing
increasingly acceptable (Putin's religious adviser recently advised against
gay marriage on the grounds that all good Russians know what happened when
sexual minorities were tolerated in the twenties!)

Bakhtin was never a Slavophile, and part of the struggle over Bakhtin has
to be against those who would use the clear division which now must be
drawn between his work and that of Volosinov and Medvedev to assimilate his
work to that of Florensky and Loseev. Although I think that Bakhtin did not
agree with Shpet's views on the novel (Shpet loathed novels), his
phenomenology seems, to my ignorant eyes, to be remarkably similar.

David Kellogg
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

On 3 February 2015 at 22:01, Juan Duarte <juanma.duarte@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello Tom,
> there has been recently edited this book,  Bronckart, C. Bota, *Bakhtine
> démasqué – Histoire d’un menteur, d’une escroquerie et d’un délire
> collectif*, Droz, Ginebra, 2011, where the authors state (and seem to
> probe) that there has been an ideological political operation in presenting
> two different authors (Voloshinov and Bakhtin), as the same (Bakhtin). They
> say that, in doing so, all the richness of the 20s marxism is obliterated
> and shadowed by the controversial figure of Bakhtine.
> I leave here an interesting article about the cuestion, by french
> philosopher Lucien Seve. I have just in french and spanish.
> http://marxismocritico.com/2013/12/30/del-caso-bajtin-al-caso-vigotsky/
>
> http://www.contretemps.eu/interventions/laffaire-bakhtine-cas-vygotski-marx-penseur-lindividualit%C3%A9-humaine
>
> Best,
> Juan Duarte
>
> 2015-02-03 9:36 GMT-03:00 Tom Martin <Tom.Martin@education.ox.ac.uk>:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > Reading the "Social memory in Soviet thought" chapter in Harry Daniels'
> > Introduction to Vygotsky, I was surprised to learn that there is an
> > authorship debate around the work of the post-Vygotsky writer Voloshinov
> > (whom, to be honest, I had never heard of before today). Apparently much
> of
> > his work was later attributed to Bakhtin.
> >
> > This caught my interest because I have been playing around with the Stylo
> > suite for R, which does Stylometric analysis. Stylo is being used in a
> > number of interesting projects to make claims about authorship. If anyone
> > sees this Voloshinov/Bakhtin question as being valid and worth pursuing,
> I
> > would be happy to spend an evening plugging the texts into R to see what
> > comes out. The only hurdle for me would be getting digital versions of
> the
> > texts in Russian - unfortunately that is beyond my linguistic and Google
> > skills.
> >
> > Best,
> > Tom
> > Doctoral candidate, Oxford University
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Juan
>