BEYOND INTERPELLATION

Abstract

The author tries to show the insufficiency of the Althusserian notion of interpellation and argues for the psychoanalytical concept of the subject. This subject emerges precisely where the interpellation fails, it is based on a part of an irreducible exteriority in the very kernel of the constituted interiority, the rest that cannot pass into the symbolic order and which is inconceivable within the Althusserian perspective. Illustrating his point with several examples ranging from melodramatic intrigues to the functioning of transference in psychoanalysis and from the Hegelian notion of the Spirit to the »Stalinist mode of subjectivation«, the author concludes that every ideology is an impossible endeavour to tackle that rest and to sort out the interior and the exterior, but that its very fuel — the jouissance that this rest elusively provides — is its explosive force as well.