The article presents Mikhail Bakhtin’s late concept of dialogue. According to the Russian theoretician, the dialogue can’t be reduced neither to everyday conversational exchange (because reading also includes a dialogic element, for example), nor to contradiction, as in dialectics (because agreement is also dialogic). According to Bakhtin, any two utterances enter a dialogic relationship, even if their authors don’t know each other, if they touch upon the same topic. Understanding is also a dialogic phenomenon par excellance. For Bakhtin, dialogue functions at a double level: a semantic relationship between utterances and a relationship of understanding between human beings. The article’s argumentation is derived from a close reading of Bakhtin’s seminal essay, The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology and Other Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis.