This essay is an attempt to interpret Mikhail Bakhtin’s working notes in a new way, by reading them as instances of fragmented writing produced in exile during the war. To capture the specific way Bakhtin’s thinking reveals itself in a difficult relationship with writing, I read these pieces through the prism of critical categories suggested by Maurice Blanchot in his book The Writing of the Disaster (1980). By means of comparative reading of these two quite disparate authors, I hope to demonstrate that the very fragmentariness of Bakhtin’s writing, a well as its unfinished and ”un-worked” character, opens it up for critical reflection.  The fragments in question should be read as exilic theory rather than merely biographic data or preliminary materials that suffer, not surprisingly, from intellectual and writerly incompleteness. This essay also discusses ambiguities in Bakhtin the asyndetic writer (a stylistic trait especially difficult to solve in translation) as methodologically central for an understanding of his philosophy of history and language.