Individuals Interpellable and Uninterpellable: Reflections on James R. Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject

Warren Montag (bio)
Occidental College

A review of Martel, James R. The Misinterpellated Subject. Duke UP, 2017.

James R. Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject is a work of great interest, and not simply for those seeking to apply Althusser’s theory of interpellation beyond its sphere of origin. For those of us who, more cautiously (perhaps too cautiously), have limited ourselves to an attempt to excavate and examine Althusser’s strange formulation, convinced that it remains in certain important ways unintelligible, Martel’s notion of misinterpellation poses new and very welcome questions. First among these is the question or problem of the untranslatability of the word most associated with Althusser’s project, the word “interpellation,” and the effects of this untranslatability on our understanding of Althusser’s entire theory of ideology and ideological subjection. In fact, I would argue, not as a criticism, but by way of a recognition of the necessary materiality of discourses, that the text’s most effective formulations appear in those places where it demonstrably mistranslates (or simply adopts pre-existing mistranslations of) Althusser’s notion of interpellation. This is not to say that Martel’s basic assumptions are simply wrong, or, in contrast, that he has replaced, perhaps without knowing that he has done so, the Althusserian account of interpellation with something more powerful or true. Althusser’s notion of interpellation is irreducibly contradictory and complex, and its complexity is indistinguishable from the theoretical specificity and singularity that give it its power.

If Martel’s study constantly poses questions to Althusser, it does so without necessarily formulating them as such and exhibits a way of thinking that, in my view, can be fully realized and put to work only when it is examined in the light of Althusser’s discussion of ideology in the essay “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses.” There is nothing more Althusserian than this apparent paradox: as he wrote with reference to Canguilhem, the history of science, and we might add, the history of concepts and knowledges, has a bit more imagination than any logic of scientific discovery.

Not very long ago, Pierre Macherey wrote that

the text that Althusser published in 1970 under the title, ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,’ where the thesis of the interpellation of the individual as a subject is advanced for the first time, while undoubtedly one of his most innovative, is also particularly disconcerting. Its exposition, by exploiting a rhetoric that combines ellipses with a kind of rhetorical violence, results in the construction of an enigmatic space that the reader must decipher for himself.(51)¹

The fact that Macherey, who was a participant in the discussions that led to the formation of the concept of interpellation, can describe the ISAs essay as an “enigmatic space” will undoubtedly surprise Anglophone readers, few if any of whom have found it particularly enigmatic. Martel’s citations and arguments may well help us recover an appreciation of the difficulties of Althusser’s text by “making speak” its ellipses and its forcing of concepts and images. We might start by acknowledging the fact that we do not exactly know what the term “interpellation,” as used in English, much more than in French (or Spanish), means: what are its synonyms or antonyms, for what words can it be substituted? I do not recapitulate here the effects of translating the French word “interpellation” as “interpellation,” a word that had all but disappeared from the English language, where in any case it never possessed the semantic range that it did and does in French (Montag, “Signifier”). Few English speakers could have made any sense at all of the term without the addition of “hail” (no equivalent of which exists in the French text), which translator Ben Brewster decided, without any indication that he had done so, to add as a synonym of interpellation. The result: for decades no one thought to ask what interpellation means in French: everyone knew it meant “hail.”

Ben Brewster’s translation gave us a text very different from the French text, and not only because of the repeated coupling of “interpellation” and “hail” in the places where the original text simply says interpellation. More importantly, the term interpellation in English in 1970 was what I have elsewhere called an empty signifier, that is, a kind of place holder marking the site where a specific meaning, or rather set of meanings necessary to Althusser’s theory, was nevertheless absent. Brewster attempted to fill this determinate gap with “hail” which, through an extension of the same paradox previously noted, has by means of Brewster’s translation and the innumerable commentaries, friendly or hostile, competent or incompetent, that took his translation as their starting point, become an actually existing synonym of interpellation in academic usage. This discursive sequence has succeeded in fortifying certain meanings and inflections of meaning, and diminishing and excluding others. A series of consequences follows from this fact, and anyone who seeks to develop the theses concerning ideology stated in the ISAs essay (and perhaps The Reproduction of Capitalism) must find a way to confront them.

I want to insist, though, on one crucial point: Brewster’s decision, for reasons that will become clear, to leave interpellation essentially untranslated rather than render it as “hail” alone, but instead (with exceptions), “interpellate or hail,” cannot simply be dismissed as an error. Brewster adds to or replaces interpellation with “hail” sixteen times, all concentrated in the two pages between “Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects” and “An Example: Christian Religious Ideology” (in which the word “hail” is not to be found). There is no equivalent of the French interpellation in English, so if Brewster’s choice was an error, it was a necessary error, objectively and materially determined, and therefore at the time unavoidable. It may now be possible, however, to re-open the case of interpellation. Martel’s book compels us to return with a renewed sense of wonder to Althusser’s enigma.

When Althusser wrote the manuscript On the Reproduction of Capitalism, from which the ISAs essay was extracted, shortly after the events of May–June 1968, one of the obvious senses of “interpellation,” the sense in which it was and still is used in the French media, made it directly relevant to Althusser’s essay: the act by which the police stop, detain, arrest or keep in custody an individual suspected of committing a crime, including rioting, destroying public or private property, etc. In English a reference to the police hailing a suspect, although not idiomatic, would certainly be understood, but its meaning stops short of the French term, denoting no more than a calling out to someone. In everyday life, police interpellation typically produces a chain of speech acts, specifically commands or orders: “hey, you there,” is regularly followed by “stop right there,” “don’t move” or “get over here,” commands that can be ignored or disobeyed only at the risk of a violent response on the part of the authorities. For this reason, ordinary usage dictates that we do not describe what the police do when they “address” a suspect or person of interest in terms of language or discourse: it is far more common to say I was stopped, grabbed, held, restrained by a police officer than that he or she yelled at or to me, let alone that he or she hailed, called out or simply spoke to me. Further, an adequate, that is, legally valid, response to the demand to stop and speak, that is, to answer questions, begins with what cannot finally originate in me and cannot take the form of a merely oral declaration on my part. As Althusser wrote in 1966 in the posthumously published Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses, “it is the Prefecture of the Police which provides the individuals whom the policemen interpellate with the identity papers the policemen request (demand) that one show” (83).

Interpellation thus cannot be reduced to hailing or calling but must be understood as a point at which a number of different material practices or “modalities of materiality” (169) conjoin (“Ideology” 169). This is not to say that the physical movements, which Althusser defines as rituals and prescribed gestures, are not accompanied by words and sounds, thought to be spoken freely but, much more commonly, cited, read out loud in “an external verbal discourse” or silently in “an ‘internal’ verbal discourse (consciousness)” from the liturgies of daily life whose most important effect is to bring about their own forgetting (169). Significantly, Martel tends to avoid referring to language or discourse per se, perhaps as much for tactical reasons as in principle. Discourse is especially encumbered with negative associations (“everything is discourse,” as uttered circa 1980), so overused that it has lost it specificity as a concept distinct from language or speech. But Althusser did use it in relation to ideology and was careful to distinguish discourse from langue, langage or parole (“Three Notes”). Further, it is important to recall that discourse for Althusser, whether external–that is, spoken or written–or internal–consciousness, what thought silently says about itself–possesses a material existence: it is irreducible to anything prior to or outside of itself of which it would be the expression.

This brings us to the powerful opening of Martel’s text: an example from Kafka’s Paradoxes and Parables of what might be called, following Althusser, Jewish Religious Ideology. In Scripture, God calls out to Abraham (Gen 22:1), although the Hebrew verb used in the passage is not “to call” ( ) but simply “to say” , introducing a sequence that will culminate in Abraham’s demonstrating his willingness to sacrifice his son if God should request it. In Kafka’s rendering, when God pronounces the proper name Abraham, every Abraham in the world at that moment hears and prepares to answer. But God intends to test Abraham with a most painful sacrifice; all but one of existing Abrahams have little to sacrifice. It is not them that God will test. But apart from Abraham the patriarch, there remains one other Abraham prepared to heed the word that he knows might not be meant for him at all. He has a son and is ready to perform the sacrifice, but he is old, dirty and poor, in short, unworthy. His heeding the summons, Kafka tells us, would be like the worst student in the class standing up to receive a prize for the best when it is announced, and being humiliated by going up to the front of the class unsummoned. Martel emphasizes the agency of the one who insists on answering a call that the evidence suggests is not clearly directed to him or the one who refuses to respond to the call that is directed to him. Here, the necessary instability of interpellation arises from the initiative of the individual subject himself who, intentionally or unintentionally, does not respond to a summons as he should. But Kafka’s parable demonstrates less the failure of interpellation to find its proper target, the capacity of the targeted individual to elude the call, or the untargeted to answer it, than the constitutive ambiguities proper to language itself, any language, even (Kafka would have said especially) the Holy Tongue spoken by God himself to Abraham.² Surely, it is significant that the parable of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son finds its analogue in the Ideological State Apparatus of the school with its disciplinary spaces and individualizing techniques, few of which are more feared by the students than that of being “called on” by the teacher.

Kafka is almost certainly drawing on a history of questions about and objections to this passage in Genesis, which deeply perplexed commentators, whose concerns are registered in the Midrash and Talmud. The commentators’ anxieties do not directly concern the fact that God proposes a test that Abraham will pass only if he is willing to kill his own son (although the problematization of this passage can hardly be disentangled from the nature of the test). Instead, their perplexity arises from (or perhaps is displaced to) the strange manner in which God’s request (and not a command, as indicated by the form of the verb according to both the Talmudic reading and that of the medieval commentator Rashi) to take Isaac to the mountain: “And He said, Please take your son, your only one, whom you love, yea, Isaac.” In the Talmud, this sequence of identifying attributes (precisely what is missing from the address to Abraham in Kafka’s parable) is understood as a kind of apostrophe on God’s part, as if he were answering a set of questions asked, but unreported in the text, by an uncomprehending Abraham whose comments are thus interpolated:

“So also did the Holy One, blessed be He, say unto Abraham, ‘I have tested thee with many trials and thou didst withstand all. Now, be firm, for My sake in this trial, that men may not say, there was no reality in the earlier ones. Thy son. [But] I have two sons! Thine only one. Each is the only one of his mother. Whom thou lovest. I love them both! Isaac! [ ](Sanhedrin 89b).

It is striking that the anxiety Genesis 22:2 has produced among commentators for over a millennium has everything to do with interpellation as a call or, perhaps even more, as a summons in its legal sense. Rashi and his forbears would prefer to preserve God’s absolute sovereignty by making him deceitful, willing to trick Abraham, than call this sovereignty into question by acknowledging what Kafka built his parable around: the recognition that even God, by speaking to human beings, must submit or subject himself to their language. But how are we to understand language here? Certainly not as a hidden order or system of rules and even less as an order of univocal signs. On the contrary, it appears as if, in speaking, God has descended, as he did in the case of Babel, in order to confuse human speech ( ), subjecting himself to the irreducible equivocity that he himself instituted and cannot abolish. Speech in this passage resists the thought that animates it and frustrates God’s attempt to communicate at every turn. In fact, it is an “angel of God from heaven” rather than God who calls out to stop Abraham from killing his son ( ) (Gen. 22:11). Kafka’s addition to the Talmudic sequence, the proper name, Abraham, if indeed it is an addition, underscores the sequence of amphibolous statements, “your son,” “your only son,” “the son you love most.” Given that the proper name, Abraham, yelled out loud in the street in any one of a number of Eastern and Central European cities during Kafka’s lifetime, would have immediately produced a crowd of responders, the parable suggests the impossibility of eliminating the threat of miscommunication, through slippage, reversal and drift of meaning, from speech.

To push the matter to an extreme, we might compare the composition made up of Genesis 21–22, Talmud, Rashi and Kafka to the well-known joke first performed by the comedy team of Abbot and Costello in the 1930s:

Abbott:
Strange as it may seem, they give [base]ball players nowadays very peculiar names.

Costello:
Funny names?

Abbott:
Nicknames, nicknames. Now, on the St. Louis team we have “Who’s on first,” “What’s on second,” “I Don’t Know is on third—”

Costello:
Well, then who’s playing first?

Abbott:
Yes.

Costello:
That’s what I want to find out. I want you to tell me the names of the fellows on the St. Louis team.

Abbott:
I’m telling you. Who’s on first, What’s on second, I Don’t Know is on third--

Costello:
You know the fellows’ names?

Abbott:
Yes.

Costello:
Well, then who’s playing first?”

Abbott:
Yes.
(“Who’s on First”)

Michel Pecheux, whose Language, Semantics and Ideology (Les Verités de la Palice, 1975) was one of the most ambitious, if not exactly influential, attempts to develop Althusser’s theses on ideology, insisted, following Freud and Lacan, on the importance of the joke, on the very possibility of something like a joke in its “crudest” forms, such as the pun, for any understanding of the nature of language. Language cannot be grasped as an immensely complex system of rules whose discovery would allow us to resolve the ambiguities of statements. Instead, for Pȇcheux, langue, scattered among the discourses, themselves embedded in the material existence of ideologies which are subject to the aleatory and plural temporality of history, can exist only through a systematic repression of what Françoise Gadet and Pêcheux would later call, following Jean-Claude Milner, the “real of langue”: the fissures (failles), gaps, and contradictions that set this order against itself in a perpetual production of equivocity (L’amour). There exists “in every langue a segment” that can be “both itself and at the same time other through the homophony, homosemy, metaphor, glissement of the lapsus and word play, and the double meanings (double entente) of its discursive effects” (Gadet and Pêcheux, La langue, 51. Thus, the process of the production of discursive effects is simultaneously and necessarily a production of side-effects and by-products, making the historical existence of discourses something other than the actualization of already existing logical possibilities, that is, something resembling a process without a subject or end(s).

Rather than understand Martel’s notion of “misinterpellation” as a failure on the part of Althusser’s Subject to hail the particular individual at whom the call was directed, something like bad aim or, conversely, the ability of “bad subjects” to duck the call coming their way, as well as the possibility that good subjects, motivated by a sense of guilt, might be moved to answer a call not in fact addressed to them, we might follow his suggestion that “failure is internal rather than external to interpellation,” given that “every act of interpellation is also an act of misinterpellation” (50). The failure, equivocity, and drift that convert interpellation into misinterpellation thus take place at the level of the utterance, the constitutive heterogeneity that incessantly opens it up to new meanings and the ever-present possibility of a forgetting of once established meanings, not subjectively, but in an entirely impersonal and objective forgetting that takes place at the level of discourse itself. Not simply a refusal to understand an order, but a failure, a slip, an infelicitous substitution irreducibly inscribed in the actual words of the order itself, addressed, as in the case of Kafka’s parable, to both the one and the many Abrahams and therefore a failure of the individualization that such orders require.

The absence of a notion of the materiality of discourse, its irreducibility to founding meanings, its constitutive and inescapable instability, and the inescapable heterogeneity of its every utterance, weigh on Martel’s argument. To clarify the theoretical stakes involved I focus on only one of his three “historical examples of interpellation and misinterpellation” (58): the case of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and its relation to the Haitian Revolution.³ In an important sense, the Declaration represents a condensation of all the problems and questions that attend the concept of interpellation both as it is developed in Althusser’s texts and as others attempt to apply it. For Martel, the Declaration instantiates a call, a call to the universal and the rights it guarantees, not simply to the citizen, but to every human individual as such, and therefore a call to assume the role of possessor of rights. The problem here is that the call of the so-called universal is not directed universally; it is unjustly particular in its application, illegitimately withheld (according to its own norms) from the laboring, propertyless majority of the human species, not only by virtue of the forms in which it was communicated, but also, as a kind of second line of defense, through its promotion of a series of mechanisms internal to the so-called universal itself that work to maintain inequalities of wealth and power outside the reach of legal reform. The enslaved masses of Haiti were the last to whom the call was addressed; among other things, their status as property meant that their freedom threatened the inalienable rights of proprietors also guaranteed by the Declaration of 1789. But they, or the literate among them and among the free black population, could not help overhearing and answering the summons to right, based on the fact that they considered themselves human. As in the case of Kafka’s Abraham, the call overshot its intended audience, bearing a vision of a universalist politics whose immanent promise was that of what Balibar has termed equaliberty. Its power of attraction, as if it engendered the very universal it proclaimed, was irresistible.

From this perspective, the specific misinterpellation in question was irreversible, the call was heard, understood and remembered, awakening not simply a desire for inclusion in the community composed of the proper addressees, but a refusal to be excluded from its audience or to tolerate exceptions to what might legitimately be called the universal. Martel cites Illan rua Wall to describe the misinterpretation that necessarily accompanies the misinterpellation: when the Haitian people, both slave and free, “took up the words” of the Declaration, “they did so out of a purposive misunderstanding” (63). Here, the misunderstanding is subjective, imposed on a text whose sole failure is that it, as they understand or misunderstand it, does not apply to them. The problem is not the objective, material form of the Declaration, but the fact that its truths are illegitimately withheld from those whose lives would be most improved by them. The discrepancy between the promise and the extent of its application creates an expectation that, if ignored, may be thought to propel the people to political action to bring all of humanity under the protection of the universal.

To speak of the Declaration carrying out a form of interpellation, however, let alone one that could be appropriated by a purposive, if not intentional, misreading or misunderstanding by those to whom it was not addressed, requires a confrontation with its concrete form. The Declaration consists not of meanings, expressed in words (implying that these same meanings might be better or at least differently expressed by other words), but of words whose meanings are other words (determined by relations of synonymy and antinomy, substitution and duplication) situated in historically determined sequences. If indeed the Declaration is a call, it is not immediately clear to whom the first sentence of the first article, “Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits,” is addressed (although one of the meanings of interpellation in French is apostrophe—an address to someone absent or off-stage). Nearly all of the terms of this phrase, its plural nouns, its verbs and adjectives, contain possibly undecidable ambiguities, beginning with “men” (les hommes). As Etienne Balibar has argued, not only does the word potentially exclude women, but its subsequent history exhibits a movement to differentiate men from those who in certain respects may appear to be men but are not, that is, a process of the differentiation of the human from subhuman or the inhuman (universalism). We should recall how easily a man can “quit,” or “renounce” his affiliation with, the human species in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Through murder or even a single act of theft, a “man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature” (11). Such ex-humans, including those who are taken prisoner after initiating an unjust war, are justly reduced to slaves who, to cite Orlando Patterson’s formulation, have died a social death and thus live or die at the pleasure of their masters.

Every term of Article I of the Declaration appears to surpass in its enunciative heterogeneity the ambiguities that perplexed the redactors of the Talmud and fascinated Kafka in Genesis 22:2. Moreover, and this is critical for any interpretation of the declaration as a call, it is difficult to imagine a commentator as relentless and thorough as Rashi failing to ask at the very beginning of the inquiry who made this declaration and to whom it is addressed. The very deliberate avoidance of the first person plural, “we,” as in “we the people,” a formulation well-known to those who drafted the Declaration, only defers this inevitable question. If this is more than a constative utterance, to use Austin’s distinction, and is endowed with a performative dimension, is there really something like a call, not to speak of a “hail” or a hailing at work here? The very word “declaration,” as opposed to something like “decree,” remains suspended between an affirmation of facts and a marker of a discursive event whose function is to introduce change. But a declaration can perform both functions simultaneously: the utterance “men are born and remain free” frees (in principle, in the abstract) those deemed to be “men” from the false assertion of natural authority and subjection, and all the more so in that it substitutes “born” for created, thereby eliding the question of the origins of earthly dominion in the will of God. To be more historically specific, the first sentence of the first article at the very least suggests that the forms of obligation and authority that characterize the feudal order in France are “unnatural” and sustained by a demonstrably false theologico-philosophical foundation. But nowhere does it address the case of the individual, a participant in a solitary or collective act of aggression, who “by his fault forfeited his own life, by some act that deserves death” (Locke 17). The person “to whom he has forfeited it, may (when he has him in his power) delay to take it, and make use of him to his own service” (17). The power the person to whom Locke refers as a “conqueror” acquires in this way is both “absolute” and “perfectly despotical” (93). This is the “perfect condition of slavery” (17), that is, the form of its legitimation, applied to those not born into servitude but transported across the Atlantic to a living death.

Martel is sensitive to the constant movement of qualification that occurs in the Declaration, a movement that cannot be reduced to the specification of its terms. To say that “men are born and remain free” en droits, that is, “with respect to rights,” inevitably poses the problem of the relation between power and right. Can we be said to possess or be endowed with rights that we nevertheless cannot exercise? The Declaration, as Martel notes, seems to answer this question, raised by Spinoza more than a hundred years before the Declaration, in the affirmative: the fact that men are born and remain free and equal does not mean that “social distinctions,” that is, forms of real inequality (above all, of wealth) disappear. Their justification derives not from law but from their economic “utility,” the fact that real as opposed to formal inequality might be necessary to the prosperity of the nation. The necessity of social distinctions is, as both Adam Smith and the Physiocrats affirmed, a natural necessity in precisely the same way that certain rights must be understood as natural and imprescriptible: they are both part of the same system of nature. Seen in this light, the four rights identified in the fourth sentence of the Declaration may be and in fact were (although by no means universally) read as organized around the defense of property, including property in persons, offering a guarantee of freedom of commerce, security of property and resistance to oppression from below and from above. The constitutive equivocity at work in the Declaration is not a matter of speculation: the discrepancies noted above are precisely what the draft Declaration of 1793 sought to resolve in favor of those without property, including at the extreme, those without property in their own persons, adding to formal right, the actual, physical ability to enjoy that right, opening a dynamic that called the private property of the means of subsistence into question and challenged the market theodicies that justified inequality on the grounds of its utility.

There is a sense in which the universalism of the Declaration is suspended before the end of the Declaration’s first sentence and forced to confront the insoluble problem, posed by its own unfolding, of defining the human and differentiating it from the subhuman, superhuman and inhuman/nonhuman. This problem, as Althusser argued in a 1966 lecture on Locke, was never defined exclusively or even primarily in what we would now call biological terms; on the contrary, a “cultural” line of demarcation runs through Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant. From this perspective, the interpellation of the individual as a legal person or subject is simultaneously to submit the individual to more or less permanent inquest whose purpose is the determination of his species being, given that a single act of violence, even restricted to the taking of someone else’s property, represents, in the case of Locke, an eruption of “animality” (“Locke” 283). The criminal is thus situated at the limit of the species: having renounced reason, he represents, according to Althusser, “the inhumanity at the heart of humanity. Reason is haunted by its radical negation, non-reason, whose natural figure is bestiality” (288–9). Those determined to be inhuman (predators in human form, to follow Locke’s formula), whether on the grounds of the specific actions of a given individual or the age-old customs of entire peoples, are placed outside the jurisdiction of natural law with its alienable rights, as well as outside the civil law that arises on its foundations. Such individuals or populations can be destroyed, just as one, Locke argues, “may kill a wolf” or a wolf pack. “Such men are not under the ties of the common law of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey” (14). Having “forfeited” their membership in the human species with the rights and privileges such membership entails, they may be made the slaves of any master who chooses to defer the moment of their death. As Althusser writes, “Slavery is death deferred or suspended” (289).

Althusser’s discussion of interpellation in the ISAs essay, however, is concerned with the act by which individuals are subjected in order that agency and authorship can be imputed to them. In fact, Althusser called what is perhaps the first form of the interpellated subject, the subject of imputation (Psychoanalysis 73). Imputation is indeed a legal/moral form of address: the individual is through law addressed as if he possessed free will, was the cause of his actions and thus was responsible for them both causally and morally/legally. The primary effect of this particular attribution of agency is to render the imputed subject accountable and punishable:

In the ordinary use of the term, subject in fact means: (1) a free subjectivity, a centre of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission. This last note gives us the meaning of this ambiguity, which is merely a reflection of the effect which produces it: the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection “all by himself” [l’individu est interpellé en sujet (libre) pour qu’il se soumette librement aux ordres du Sujet, donc pour qu’il accepte (librement) son assujettissement, donc qu’il “accomplisse tout seul” les gestes et actes de son assujettissement]. There are no subjects except by and for their subjection. That is why they “work all by themselves.”(“Ideology” 182)

Althusser does not say that individuals are interpellated as (free) subjects so that they will believe they are free to determine their own actions (which would make ideology a form of false consciousness), but in order that they will freely submit or be submitted to (se soumettre) the commandments (ordres) of the Subject. Pour que, translated here as “in order that,” essentially indicates a causal relation. Interpellation, to follow the sentence, brings it about that the movement by which the body of the individual is determined to submit to the orders of authority simultaneously produces the belief in her or his having done so by her or his own free will. Submission and subjection in this sense cannot be understood as mental attitudes or internal preferences which would then determine the body to act according to these attitudes. They consist of “the gestures and actions (actes) that an individual makes (accomplisse: performs or executes) ‘all by himself.’” The Spinozist thesis of the simultaneity of thought and corporeal action at work here questions the very notion of interpellation as a hail or call separable from the physical regime of subjection. For Althusser, as for the Foucault of Discipline and Punish, a focus on consciousness, deceived or manipulated, as the instrument of domination simply serves to conceal the forms of coercion and subjugation that simultaneously cause the body to act and the mind to think. If interpellation cannot be as understood as a call or hail but as conjunction of materialities in the production of subjection, must we then reject the idea of misinterpellation, and perhaps even more importantly, the very notion of resistance?

If we can speak of interpellation as a summons immanent in apparatuses, practices, and rituals, its precise wording inseparable from the exercise of coercion and constraint proper to it, we must reject the notion of a universalist clarion call, even one that reaches the wrong audience, thereby exploding its own limits. Who is to say that the summons heard, or felt, or hallucinated by a half a million enslaved people in Haiti was not the demand inscribed in every one of their innumerable acts of resistance and revolt, returned, as through a feedback effect, upon itself, mediated through the revolution in France, from the masses to the masses? Or that the unceasing struggles, not simply or even primarily against the juridical form of slavery established in Le code noir, but for the bare possibility of continuing to live, combined and crossed the Atlantic to detonate the explosion that was the French revolution. Rather than understand trans-Atlantic chattel slavery as the exception to the formal equality whose development it followed step by step like a shadow, an injustice that Europeans had slowly come to believe they could no longer tolerate, we might say that the forms of violence and subjection proper to it, suddenly given new visibility by the very force of the resistance against them, could be understood as the terminal point on a spectrum of extraction, control and torture, where cruelty and accumulation coincided perfectly, and on which could be located the concrete existence of the newly freed laborer and the peasant. But there is no question that the modern form of slavery was the terminal point; beyond it, there was only death, whether by direct force or abandonment. These struggles, from daily resistance to mass insurrection, in the mutual immanence of their discursive and corporeal forms, crossed the Atlantic in both directions, invading and doing violence to the language of the Declaration in a kind of discursive equivalent of Bois Caiman. They infiltrated and occupied the sublime discourses on property and freedom, found their weak points and hiding places, and from there released the compound that would decompose or paralyze these discourses. Here we understand why the Haitian revolution was so long ignored: from it emerged a new historical figure, of which Frankenstein’s monster was a dim and confused sign: nameless and uninterpellable, a singularity so irreducibly multiple and heterogeneous in its composition that no call could reach it, no summons could compel its obedience.⁴

Althusser taught us to judge books by their theoretical and practical effects. The effect of James Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject is to show that confronting the problem of subjection, and Althusser’s reflections on it, remains an unavoidable, even urgent, task. It is part of the struggle in theory that is inseparable from the practical struggles of that war without refuge we call the present.

Footnotes

1. This translation is my own.

2. The parable poses the problem of proper names in a way that condenses a series of philosophical reflections on the topic from Frege to Kripke.

3. The other two examples are 1) Wilson’s speech to the US Congress on January 8, 1918 known as the fourteen points; in particular, the fifth point, establishing the right of colonized populations to have a voice equal to that of the colonial power in determining the future of the colony; and 2) the Arab Spring in Tunisia at the end of 2010, where the contradictions contained in the call of neoliberal universalism exploded. Martel sees both as forms of a call that reaches the wrong audiences and is given by them a meaning that exceeds or is opposed to that of the original utterance

4. I am indebted to Scott Henkel’s careful reading of C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, the focus of which is the image, word, and concept of “the swarm.” From the slave masters’ perspective, referring to rebel slaves as a “swarm” or simply to describe their activity as “swarming” at the end of the eighteenth century was to both call their humanity into question and to grant each of them an individuality that perpetually vacillated between visibility and invisibility, decomposing and recomposing with the movement of the swarm in a way that excluded the assignment of fixed personal identities. But “swarm” possessed what Foucault called a “tactical polyvalence:” it represented a mode of collectivity irreducible either to an organic hierarchy or to a carefully engineered coincidence of individual interests. An organizational form immanent in slave resistance, it represented both a new form of decision-making and deliberation and a military strategy (see pp. 29–48).

Works Cited

• Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and The Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, New Left Books, 1971, pp. 127–186.
• ———. Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences. Translated by Steven Hendall, Columbia UP, 2016.
• ———. “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses.” The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, translated by G.M. Goshgarian. Verso, 2003, pp. 33–84.
• ———. “Locke.” Politique et histoire: de Machiavel à Marx. Cours à l’École normale supérieure, 1955–1972, Éditions de Seuil, 2006, pp. 281–299.
• Gadet, Françoise, and Michel Pȇcheux. La langue introuvable. Maspero, 1981.
• Henkel, Scott. Direct Democracy: Collective Power, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas. UP of Mississippi, 2017.
• Locke, John. Second Political Treatise. Edited by C.B. Macpherson, Hackett, 1980.
• Macherey, Pierre. Le sujet des normes. Éditions Amsterdam, 2014.
• Milner, Jean-Claude. L’amour de la langue. Éditions de Seuil, 1978.
• Montag, Warren. “Althusser’s Empty Signifier: What is the Meaning of the Word ‘Interpellation?’” Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, Summer 2017, Vol. 30, Iss. 2. http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/Empty_Signifier, Accessed 3 February 2018.
• Pȇcheux, Michel. Language, Semantics and Ideology [1975]. Translated by Harbans Nagpal, St. Martin’s Press, 1982.
• ———. La langue introuvable. Maspero, 1979.
• ———. “Dare to Think and Dare to Rebel! Ideology, Marxism, Resistance, Class Struggle.” Décalages, Vol. 1, Iss. 4 (2014), pp. 1–28. http://scholar.oxy.edu/decalages/vol1/iss4/12, Accessed 3 February 2018.
• “Who’s on First.” Script. http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/inart10/whos.html, Accessed 3 February 2018.