Plurality in dialogue: A comment on Bakhtin

In the following analysis I will focus on Bakhtin's concept of dialogical p lurality, arguing that in spite of his position against the finalization of speech and his attack on monologistic, authoritarian unity, his dialogism is itself based on a supposition of wholeness. By insisting on dialogue as a remedy, Bakhtin's dialogism tends to oversimplify the instability and thr eat inherent in dialogue. The present study explores plurality as dependent on a shift into dialogue. The threshold of entrance and of exit which defi nes the 'betweenness' of dialogue comes out as a rather problematic, torn l ink. It requires a constant making of a topic and is threatened and informe d by forces of coercion, exclusion, break, strangeness and silence. Plurali ty becomes a critical trope in social theory that focuses on the very thres hold of dialogue rather than on either a simplified and smoothed version of the dialogic connection or on an exclusive version that splits between the dialogic and the monologic in an overstated ethics.