The Misinterpellated Subject

by James R. Martel

Although Haitian revolutionaries were not the intended audience for the Declaration of the Rights of Man, they heeded its call, demanding rights that were not meant for them. This failure of the French state to address only its desired subjects is an example of the phenomenon James R. Martel labels "misinterpellation." Complicating Althusser's famous theory, Martel explores the ways that such failures hold the potential for radical and anarchist action. In addition to the Haitian Revolution, Martel shows how the revolutionary responses by activists and anticolonial leaders to Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points speech and the Arab Spring sprang from misinterpellation. He also takes up misinterpellated subjects in philosophy, film, literature, and nonfiction, analyzing works by Nietzsche, Kafka, Woolf, Fanon, Ellison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others to demonstrate how characters who exist on the margins offer a generally unrecognized anarchist form of power and resistance. Timely and broad in scope, The Misinterpellated Subject reveals how calls by authority are inherently vulnerable to radical possibilities, thereby suggesting that all people at all times are filled with revolutionary potential.

Genres: Theory

344 pages, Hardcover

Published February 24, 2017

Reviews

[Scott Neigh]

Theory. Anti-authoritarian. Fascinating and very useful to me. Deserves a full review but not sure I’ll have a chance to write one, so this may have to do. Starts from Althusser’s idea of interpellation but instead of focusing (as Althusser does) on situations where the authoritative hail and subjectifying response happen relatively frictionlessly, it thinks through the consequences and implications of instances in which someone responds who was not intended to be called. The first half of the book examines dramatic collective historical examples — for instance, the supposedly universal rights in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were never intended to include slaves or people of African descent, yet the enslaved population of Haiti answered the Declaration’s call and fought a revolution that reverberates down the centuries to today. The second half the book uses literary and filmic examples to explore misinterpellation at the level of everyday life. It ultimately argues that interpellation is always misinterpellation — that even when the call and response are relatively frictionless, the respondent is never really who was called, and this has important implications for how we understand our selves and how we act politically in the world. As I said, it deserves a more thorough review than I can currently give it...but it plugs in well to how I already think about certain things, challenges me in other ways, and gives me things to think about that are relevant to something I’m working on at the moment. If this sounds like material you’d be interested in, it’s well worth reading.

[Niall]

Could be my new favourite theory book:

"But take another Abraham. One who wanted to perform the sacrifice altogether in the right way and had a correct sense in general of the whole affair, but could not believe that he was the one meant, he, an ugly old man, and the dirty youngster that was his child." (Kafka)

This Abraham serves as a model for what I am calling the misinterpellated subject. This Abraham is, as already noted, seemingly unexpected (“unsummoned!”); he is not called (not interpellated), yet he responds nonetheless. He is the one who gets interpellation wrong; he turns a call by authority into farce, or perhaps—considering who is doing the calling—something far more subversive than farce. This Abraham’s very presence is a challenge to and an interruption of the intended narrative.