Who, Me? : Subjectivity and the Politics of Resistance in Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject

Our political present is shot through with resentment, anxiety, and fear. In the wake of Charlottesville and the visible and violent re-assertion of white supremacy enabled (as it always has been) by the liberal state and explicitly supported by President Trump, it seems imperative to ask where new acts of resistance might come from and what forms they might take. Where can left politics, which has failed visibly in recent years (or as some might say, has never fully been explored in the US) find new sources of resistance and agency in such a seemingly bankrupt present? As James Martel asks in his brilliant new book “The Misinterpellated Subject”, what kind of anarchic possibilities can emerge to challenge the liberal-capitalist state, what complex and even communal forms of subjectivity can replace the atomistic liberal subject, and in what heretofore unattended places of our political life (and imagination) should we look to in order to find them? In the absence of redemptive narratives of progress, where no messiah ever arrives to save us from ourselves, perhaps we should, as Martel argues incisively in his book, look for the unlikely, those in the shadows, the seemingly lethargic, who still have the capacity to call into question and challenge the ideologies that seek to interpellate us as subjects. Through his compelling critique of Althusser’s famous account of interpellation (“Hey, You There!”), Martel offers us a new lens through which to view the complexity and contingency of subject formation, looking not at the interpellated subject, but the misinterpellated subject, the one who answers the call by mistake, who shows up when she is not expected or wanted but who by her very presence has the capacity to do great damage to the ties that bind us to the liberal-capitalist state.

Martel begins with Kafka’s Abraham, which gives us a different narrative about the divine call and the sacrificial response. In this re-working, there are multiple interlocutors of which “there is one last, final—and clearly lowliest—Abraham who, of all these likely figures, is the least likely to be intentionally called”, who nevertheless responds to the call and in doing so he “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” (Martel, 2). With this provocative and intriguing re-telling, Martel begins to peel back the façade of phantasms and myths that sustain the mechanisms of interpellation and look instead at those instances when interpellation fails, when the subject answers a call that is not intended for her and how by her very presence the “order is wrecked” and a new potentiality opens u Martel asks insistently, what happens when such a subject “shows up and refuses to go away?” (Martel, 4). How might such a subject “interact with the ongoing effects of state power and authority?” (Martel, 4). Over the course of this deeply original work Martel offers close readings of an astonishing array of events and texts, using the Haitian Revolution, the Wilsonian moment, and the Arab Spring as case studies, and reading widely and deeply from Fanon to Nietzsche, from Melville and Woolf to Ellison and Coates and even Von Trier. The result of this rich and provocative inquiry is that the misinterpellated subject emerges as a significant (but non-heroic and certainly non-redemptive) figure of resistance. Misinterpellation might be most clearly seen in these moments of failure or error, when the wrong person answers the call, but Martel seeks to make these moments something “more than accidental” to yield “broader, deeper, and more sustained results” (Martel, 6). Misinterpellation, he argues, underlines the failure of subjectivity and reveals a “permanent vulnerability” at the heart of interpellation (does the law or the state ever fully know who they are calling? What indeed does the authority of the caller rest on?) and in these moments when interpellation...