Although Bakhtin's ideas have been mainly explored in the realm of literature and linguistics, his ideas of ventriloquation and polyphony could be mobilized to study the communicative constitution of reality, more generally. Using an excerpt taken from a conversation between two administrators, we show how various forms of ventriloquism actualize themselves in what they say and the way they say it. This kind of analysis amounts to questioning our traditional way of conceiving of discourse and interaction in general, especially in terms of their roles in the constitution of our world. The world we live in is a speaking and personified world; a world that comes to speak through us because people make it speak in a specific way. ]) was among the first to insist on the polyphonic and heteroglot nature of discourse. According to the Russian scholar, many voices can be heard and recognized in a text, whether via the various styles of expression used by an author, the choice of words, or the characters that talk in it. In a famous passage from "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin (1981 [1975]) writes:… there are no "neutral" words and forms-words and forms that can belong to "no one"; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world. All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions. Contextual overtones (generic, tendentious, individualistic) are inevitable in the word. (p. 293)Various figures (professions, generations, genres, etc.) can thus be heard and recognized in any utterance, text, or interaction, which means that these figures can also

We deal with the notion of fictive interaction, namely the use of the conversation frame in order to structure cognition, discourse, and grammar (Pascual 2002, 2006b, 2014). We discuss how thought and the conceptualization of experience are partly modeled by the pattern of conversation, and present the kinds of fictive interaction on different levels: the discourse, the inter-sentential, the sentential, and intra-sentential level, down to the morpheme. We also provide a list of its defining characteristics (conversational features, non-actual and non-token interpretation, metonymy), and discuss what makes this ubiquitous phenomenon, widespread across languages, discourse genres, and sociolinguistic groups, worth studying, and what its theoretical implications are. The chapter closes with an overview of the structure and content of this volume.

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(at sergeiys@gmail.com) Abstract. Søren Kierkegaard's influence on the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin has received relatively little attention from Bakhtin scholars (and hardly any attention from Bakhtin scholars in the English-speaking world). Yet, as I argue in this paper, Kierkegaard was among the most important formative influences on Bakhtin's work. This influence is most evident in Bakhtin's early ethical philosophy, but remains highly relevant in later periods. Reading Bakhtin as a follower and developer of Kierkegaard's fundamental philosophical insights provides us with a key to the unity of Bakhtin's thought. One may divide the reception of the work of the Russian thinker Mikhail MikhailovichBakhtin into three waves. At first it was assimilated to familiar paradigms (Marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism, etc.) 1 The second wave emphasized Bakhtin's originality as a thinker, 2 but was also prone to overstate it. The third wave, which extends to the present time, reacted with a more careful scholarly approach, focusing on the sources of influence onBakhtin's thought, 3 but this scholarly precision sometimes came at the expense of understanding what is truly new in Bakhtin's work. However, as Bakhtin himself stressed, a truly original utterance is original by virtue of how it incorporates within it the voices of those who spoke before. The role played by Bakhtin's sources of influence on forming his original thought has often been neglected or deeply misunderstood.In this paper I focus on one particular source of influence on Bakhtin's thought, though, as I shall argue, an especially important one: the Danish philosopher Søren Aabye Kierkegaard. What Is the Kierkegaardian Revolution?Søren Kierkegaard belonged to a generation of European thinkers who had a crucial influence on the development of modern philosophy. I will refer to it as the post-Hegelian generation, not only because it followed Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in time, but also because responding to Hegel's philosophical system, as they interpreted it, was a central project for these thinkers. They were significantly influenced by Hegel's work but ultimately rejected it.(By using the term "post-Hegelian" I am consciously overstating the role played by Hegel himself, as towering a figure as he was; other thinkers made important contributions to the positions post-Hegelianism reacted against, which are also relevant to the aims of the present paper, 9 but a focus on Hegel does make for a clearer exposition of the issues at stake; Hegel's name is used here symbolically, somewhat like Descartes' name is, when speaking broadly of modern philosophy as "Cartesian").Hegel's philosophy is notoriously difficult and a brief exposition cannot possibly do it justice. Nevertheless, I will try to touch on a few central points, as a necessary background for the rest of the discussion.Hegel was a systematic idealist philosopher, i.e. he sought to provide a unified philosophical account of consciousness and, through it, of the world. In the Phenomeno...

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