Vološinov, la philosophie du langage et le marxisme

Abstract

V. Vološinov's book Marxism and the philosophy of language (1929), wrongly attributed to M. Bakhtin, gave rise to contradictory reactions. One of the many paradoxes that surounded the book is that it is in the West that it has been the most successful, twenty-five years before its new publication in Russia, where it had been totally forgotten since the beginning of the 1930s. What is at stake is the understanding of the word "Marxist": generally read as a "Marxist" book by Western intellectuals, it is on the contrary considered as an "anti-marxist book" in post-Soviet Russia. This paper tries to cast a new light on the relationship between language, ideology and social groups, by examining the methods of translation of the reflexions on language in Eastern Europe.