The Misinterpellated Subject

Description

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. Acknowledgments ix Introduction. Unsummoned! When the Call Is Not Meant for You 1 Part I. Subjects of the Call 1. From "Hey, You There!" to "Wait Up!": The Workings (and Unworkings) of Interpellation 35 2. "Men Are Born Free and Equal in Rights": Historical Examples of Interpellation aend Misinterpellation 58 3. "Tiens, un Nègre": Fanon and the Refusal of Colonial Subjectivity 96 Part II. The One(s) Who Showed Up 4. "[A Person] Is Something That Shall Be Overcome": The Misinterpellated Messiah, or How Nietzsche Saves Us from Salvation 133 5. "Come, Come!": Bartleby and Lily Briscoe as Nietzschean Subjects 163 6. "Consent to Not Be a Single Being": Resisting Identity, Confronting the Law in Kafka's Amerika, Ellison's Invisible Man, and Coates's Between the World and Me 198 7. "I Can Believe": Breaking the Circuits of Interpellation in von Trier's Breaking the Waves 243 Conclusion. The Misinterpellated Subject: Anarchist All the Way Down 266 Notes 275 Bibliography 309 Index 317