“HEY, YOU THERE!”: THE MIS-INTERPELLATED SUBJECT

Course Catalog Description

This seminar will examine the political theory of interpellation. Do all modes of interpellation end in the production of subjectivity? Are there different modes of (mis)interpellating the subject? Is subjective misrecognition immanent to interpellation? From the foundational texts of Frantz Fanon, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan, to the more recent works of Saidiya Hartman, and C. Riley Snorton, this course seeks to interrogate the ways in which the colonial formation of racial and gender differences affect both: i) the subjectivity that presumably results from the interpellative gesture, and ii) the different modes that interpellation takes when seeking to either constitute or destitute the subject.

Detailed Course Proposal

“‘Hey, you there!’: The Mis-interpellated Subject” seeks to interrogate the colonial history of the subject the theory of interpellation assumes ideology turns individuals into. Do all modes of interpellation culminate in the production of subjectivity? What accounts for the different modes of interpellating the subject, when police hailing takes either a more verbally injurious form, or a non-verbal and potentially lethal form? What logics of power account for the different forms that interpellation takes? And is mis-interpellation the proper way of understanding these other forms of police hailing? This seminar is divided in four parts. The first part is devoted to an understanding of the early theory of interpellation, through a close textual analysis of Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan’s foundational texts. The second part analyzes various attempts to put Althusser and Lacan’s theories in conversation with each other in the works of Judith Butler, and Robert Pfaller. This part also seeks to problematize the relationship between a structural and a historical analysis of subjectivity, by focusing on the performative aspects of the interpellative gesture. Departing from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and the influence of Fanon’s analysis in the work of Glean Sean Coulthard, the third part of the seminar is devoted to an analysis of the racialized and gendered individual assumed in the theory of interpellation. We will also interrogate the ways in which the policing function is pluralized in multiple agencies beyond the repressive apparatus of the state. From interpellation to fungibility in the works of Saidiya Hartman and C. Riley Snorton, the last part of this seminar interrogates the (in)adequacy of interpellation to account for the experience of individuals at the intersection of various systems of coercion.

Required and Recommended Readings

Part 1 (Required)

1. Althusser, Louis. [1970] 2001. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other. New York: Monthly Review Press, pp. 85-127.
2. Recommended:     

• Lacan, Jacques. [1966] 2006. “The Mirror-Stage as Formative of the Function of the I.” In Écrits, translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 75-81.

• Žižek, Slavoj. [1989] 2008. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso.

Part 2 (Required)

3. Butler, Judith. 1997. “Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All,” In The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 106-131.
4. Pfaller, Robert. 1998. “Negation and Its Reliabilities: An Empty Subject for Ideology?” In Cogito and the Unconscious, edited by Slavoj Žiž Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 225-246.

Recommended:

• Dolar, Mladen. 1993. “Beyond Interpellation.” Qui Parle 6 (2): 75-96

• Copjec, Joan. 1995. “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan.” In Read my Desire. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 15-38.

• Butler, Judith. 1993. “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary.” In Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, pp. 28-57.

Part 3 (Required)

5. Fanon, Frantz. [1952] 2008. “The Lived Experience of Black Man.” In Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008, pp. 89-119.

Recommended: 

• Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. “Seeing Red: Reconciliation and Resentment.” In Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp 105-129.

• Hage, Ghassan. 2010. “The Affective Politics of Racial Mis-Interpellation.” In Theory, Culture & Society 27: 112-129.

• Martell, James. 2017. The Misinterpellated Subject. Durham: Duke University Press.

Part 4 (Required)

7. Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. “Innocent Amusements: The Stage of Sufferance.” In Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 17-48.

Recommended:

• Spillers, Hortense. 1987. “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar.” In Diacritics 17 (2): 64-81.

• Edelman, Lee. 1994. “The Part for the (W)hole: Baldwin, Homophobia, and the Fantasmatics of ‘Race’.” In Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. New York: Routledge, pp. 42-78.

• Sharpe, Christina. 2010. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press.

• Snorton, C. Riley. 2017. “Trans Capable” Fungibility, Fugitivity, and the Matter of Being.” In Black on Both Sides. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 55-97.