Bachtin: The richness of Theory. Against the poverty of 'contextual studies' (cultural studies etc.)

What is required for a work of art to belong to great time? The wealth of its organization – i.e. its language. But this isn’t enough. Works (literary, philosophical, etc.) live in the time of their reception and interpretation: in order for a work to become ‘great’, its interpretations must break through the integument of empirical time, the paralyzing limits of historical context. The only fully legitimate context for a work of art is great time. Everything else (history, culture, gender), at most, can serve an auxiliary function. Interpretation too must be part of great time, otherwise the work of art will be trivialized, and will continue to be misread. The time of interpretation, requiring as it does constant developments in theory, cannot but be trans-contextual – not in a banally thematic and comparative sense: theory’s ‘trans-contextuality’ is not the same thing as Comparative Literature’s multiplication of contexts. If literature today tends to be marginalized, it is not only because of the propagation of visual languages, which are certainly more ‘user-friendly’. Literature’s loss of prestige is largely the result of the dominance acquired by ‘contextual studies’ such as cultural studies, postcolonial theory, etc., which constrain works of art within a small time: a poor time, an impoverished intelligence. Bakhtin shows us that the path toward literature is the path of theory, and chiefly of pluralist logic, an intelligence capable of taking on the problem of the bêtise, the modes of identity. Without this perspective, even Bakhtin’s thought gets trivialized, and is lost to great time.