spectacularly fruitful way: we do not expect a work devoted to the Marxist
philosophy of language to contain a chapter, which is still read and commented
on by specialists, on indirect free speech – a concept more common among
literary critics than political activists. But the dialogical conception of language,
the fact that any utterance is not only caught up in a current dialogue, but
contains the sedimentation of past dialogues as well as the anticipation of
future dialogues (the chain of utterances has no beginning and no end),
renders the study of reported speech crucial for understanding the functioning
of language. For, in an important sense, there is only reported speech: every text
is a tissue, according to etymology, but a tissue of voices and not only of
words. This theme is taken up by Deleuze and Guattari.
I shall end with a few words on Voloshinov’s second book, devoted to a
critique of Freudianism. For conjunctural reasons, this book has been completely
ignored in France (despite a translation published in Switzerland). It was
difficult to criticise psychoanalysis without lapsing into a reactionary position;
and it will be remembered that Althusser witheld the text in which he criticised
Lacan and that it was only belatedly published and against his will.
The interesting thing about Voloshinov’s critique of Freudianism is that it
is utterly consistent with his philosophy of language. Thus, he approves of
the notion of the ‘talking cure’, in that Freud deals with a material which is
always verbal – the utterances produced by the analysand speaker being the
only mode of access to the unconscious. Contrariwise, he criticises what he
calls Freud’s ‘subjectivism’ – that is, his version of methodological individualism
(to each subject his individual consciousness) – and his biological reductionism.
The unconscious conceived in terms of metaphors of depth and surface –
what was formerly called ‘depth psychology’ – is incompatible with
subjectivation through language, in the practice of interlocution. And he
likewise criticises – and here he is not alone – psychoanalysts’ belief in a form
of human nature (in the shape of libidinal energy, drives, universal Oedipal
structures, etc.).
Against what he perceives as the essential positions of psychoanalysis,
Voloshinov posits two theses. The first is that the unconscious is not located
in the depths of the psyche but on the outside, in interlocution. We therefore
have an unconscious which is external, public, collective and social (meaning
that this ‘unconscious’ is not one: it is – or aspires to become – conscious).
What Freudians call ‘unconscious’ is nothing but the internalisation of public
116 • Chapter Five