SOURCE: Hitchcock, Peter. “The Grotesque of the Body Electric.” In Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words, edited by Michael Mayerfeld Bell and Michael Gardiner, pp. 78-94. London: SAGE Publications, 1998.

In the following essay, Hitchcock uses the biographical details of Bakhtin's physical deterioration and the amputation of his legs in an exploration of the possibilities of the grotesque inherent in the carnival.

We must share each other's excess in order to overcome our mutual lack.

—Michael Holquist

I begin with Bakhtin's leg; or rather, its manifest absence. I will begin by singing Bakhtin's body electric, the materiality of his body and the body-image that, in true historico-allegorical fashion, move across the borders of theory and practice.¹ I commence, therefore, with the practical experience of Bakhtin's body. Bakhtin, a consummate theorist of the body, begins with the unconsummated nature of his own tissue, a body that for most...