Dialectical dialogue: the struggle for speech, repressive silence, and the shift to multiplicity

In the present essay I intend to explore 'dialectical dialogue' in three distinct moments: the battle for recognition, the ethics of giving recognition, and the multiplicity of conversation. The essay begins with Hegel's figures of Master and Slave portraying the struggle of speech for recognition. This struggle culminates in a duel for mastery, which implies the repression and silencing of the other's speech. Ethical dialogue comes as a response to repressive silence, calling the other into egalitarian exchange. Ethical dialogue as such, however, remains within the dialectical framework of agonistic relations. To shift from dialectics to multiplicity, the essay turns from the politics of recognition to the poetics of conversation, to polyphony and to passage. I will follow the three moments both separately, through particular dialogic instances and theoretical perspectives, and as they develop, respond to, and shift from one to the other. Together they will portray an idea of the 'social' as a critical dialogic stance with its inherent dialectical betweenness and potential opening and expanding multiplicity.