A dialogue between dialogism and interality

Abstract

Dialogue and dialogism offer one of the most promising paths to interality in the West. Concentrating on the Renaissance tradition of the Humanist dialogue and more recent philosophical practices and theories of dialogue in the twentieth century, this article argues- most notably through a close examination of two major literary and philosophical works: Thomas More's Utopia and Robert Musil's Man without Qualities-that one can trace an (interrupted) line between these two transitional historical periods, set at both ends of the "Gutenberg parenthesis," when relational, dialogic, and thus potentially "interalogical" modes of writing, thinking, and being came to the forefront.