Abstract

This study deals with the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, Osip Mandelshtam, and Paul Celan in light of the authors' shared concern with the transcendental significance of dialogue as a complex dynamics of interpellation, response, and responsibility. Beginning from the stipulation of dialogue as a fundamental, multi-layered moment in the make-up of human reality, it investigates its ethico-existential underpinnings and its enactment in and through poetry. Levinas's, Bakhtin's, Mandelshtam's, and Celan's writings reveal themselves as dialogically complementary: while Levinas and Bakhtin describe and theorize the ethical and existential foundations of dialogue, respectively, Mandelshtam and Celan poetically enact dialogue, thereby demonstrating, as it were, both the viability of Levinas's and Bakhtin's claims and the transformative power of poetry as a socio-politically exemplary practice. The elaboration of the authors' dialogic interdependence involves extensive discussions of Levinas's ethics with particular attention to its semiotic structure, Bakhtin's philosophy of the act with particular attention to its relation to metalinguistics, Mandelshtam's and Celan's poetics with particular attention to the poets' respective emphases on dialogue, and, finally, Celan's Mandelshtam translations and original poetry with particular attention to the cycle Die Niemandsrose. The concomitant engagement of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandelshtam, and Celan necessitates the development of poethics, which captures both Celan's particular mode of responding to Mandelshtam and the interpreter's own idiosyncratic approach to the four authors as a form of criticism