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Valentin Volosinov's and Mikhail Bakhtin's views of ideology and language in the late I920s, articulated in their major work, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, enable us to "place" the concept of ideology in the dialogue between Russian Marxism and other philosophical schools, mainly Lebensphilosophie (philosophy-oflife).' While the peculiar position of Volosinov in the Marxist debates on ideology has clearly been pointed out by several scholars,2 little has been done to explore the roots of his ideas. As I argue here, Volosinov's (and Bakhtin's) writings on ideology and language figured in a complex effort to reformulate and translate ideas from Lebensphilosophie and neo-Kantian philosophy into the language of Marxism so that they could become instrumental in its sociological project. In reading the Bakhtin of the second half of the 1920s as alternatively a philosophy-of-life, neoKantian, or Marxist thinker, we fail to do justice to his organic, if temporarily limited (in the case of his dealings with Marxism), participation in all three traditions. Stimulated by his communication with Volosinov, Bakhtin's participation never amounted to full belonging, and his presumed originality in the late 1920s should be traced to his ability to subject those three approaches to a mutually challenging examination. From this point of view, it would be as unsupportable to claim that Marxism was for Bakhtin merely rhetoric under which his allegedly heretical thoughts could remain hidden as it would be to consider him a consistent Marxist theorist. The history of ideas offers more stories of continuity and mixture than of radical breaks, neat divisions, and innocent conceptions. Volosinov and Bakhtin's book would seem to be a strong case in point: their writings on ideology and language reveal, beneath the Marxist sociological project, fascinating palimpsests of Lebensphilosophie and neo-Kantianism.
The endeavor to bring Kantianism and Marxism together has been a significant element of Russian intellectual life ever since the latter half of the nineteenth century. By I9o9-Io, S. L. Frank, himself suspicious of the value of these efforts, had nevertheless affirmed the question of their relationship as a traditional philosophical and social concern in Russia.3 By the time Volosinov and Bakhtin undertook their work on ideology and language, such neo-Kantian or philosophy-of-life thinkers as Hermann Cohen, Georg Simmel, and Ernst Cassirer were well-known in...