NYRB: "Bakhtin's first principle of ethics is: never treat another human being as wholly knowable and predictable, even in principle"
"When you have applied all possible categories to a person--social class, nationality, historical period, ethnicity, even personality type as shaped by years of experience and patterns of behavior--there is still something left over. It is this 'surplus,' as Bakhtin calls it, that makes a person human"
see his "Epic and Novel"