Michail Bachtin: il silenzio e il tacere. Armoniche dialogiche e irradiazioni figurali

Meditation on the 'unsaid' informs the entire oeuvre of Michail Bachtin and plays a crucial part in the development of that philosophy of dialogue which the Russian thinker elaborated starting from the 1920s and well into the 1970s. By incorporating suggestions from his sources - as for example Otto Bollnow - Bakhtin's meditation yields a wide range of theoretical and methodological tools in all the different disciplines that it deals with, to such a degree that systematization into a phenomenology of silence and its figural potentialities might be safely attempted. Close examination of the functional role played by pauses between enunciations which feature in essays on linguistics ; the link between silence and self-Affirmation and the interpretation of silence as disguise with respect ti the authorial position ; notes on the Russian words umolchanie ('hush' : silence as absence of words ) - and tishina ('quiet' : silence as absence of sound ) : These are just few instances where the 'unsaid', seen as rhetorical device, reveals its hermeneutical value.