Patrick SERIOT (University of Lausanne)

Subject and social psychology in Voloshinov's work

Voloshinov's anti-psychologism relies on an overwhelming sociologism : all our thoughts are "social" because they are 1) orientated on someone else, 2) made of verbal signs, which, in their turn, belong to a social milieu and not to individuals : they are therefore "ideological".

What is at stake, however, is the very definition of what the word "social" means. One thing seems taken for granted : "social" is what is external to the individual. But this externality is two-faced. On the one hand, it is entangled in class struggle, it is the the result of the division of society into antagonistic points of view, but on the other hand, it is pure otherness of the other. At times "socialness" is made of group psychology, at times it is made of inter-subjectivity.

Voloshinov was often considered in France in the 1970's as a forerunner of the theory of enunciation and of a theory of ideologies based on the inconscious. Nonetheless, a careful reading of his works shows that his idea of the subject is extremely close to Descartes's classical idea of a "full subject", which has very little to do with Lacan's "split subject".

The aims of this paper is to deconstruct the modern vision of Voloshinov's work as far as the idea of the subject is concerned : full or split?