Dolar, Mladen. “Beyond Interpellation” Qui Parle 6.2 (1993): 75-96.
But the famous formula of interpellation – “the ideology interpellates individuals into subjects” – implies a clean cut as well. There is a sudden and abrupt transition from an individual- a pre-ideological entity, a sort of materia prima — into the ideological subject, the only kind of subject there is for Althusser.
One becomes a subject by suddenly recognizing that one has always already been a subject: becoming a subject has always takes effect retroactively — it is based on a necessary illusion, an extrapolation, an illegitimate extension of a later state into the former stage. A leap — a moment of sudden emergence — occurs. 76
… there is a part of individual that cannot successfully pass into the subject, an element of “pre-ideological” and “presubjetive” materia prima that continues to haunt subjectivity once it is constitued as such. A part of external materiality that cannot be successfully integrated in the interior.
Interpellation was based on a happy transition from a pre-ideological state into ideology: successfully achieved it wipes out the traces of its origin and results in a belief in the autonomy and self-transparency of the subject. The subject is experienced as <em>causa sui</em> — in itself an inescapable illusion once the operation is completed.
How exactly would materiality entail subjectivation? Why would interpellation require materiality? One could say that materiality and subjectivity rule each other out: if I am (already) a subject, I am necessarily blinded in regard to materiality.
The psychoanalytic point of departure is the remainder produced by the operation; psychoanalysis does not deny the cut, it only adds a remainder. The clean cut is always unclean, it cannot produce the flawless interiority of an autonomous subject. The psychoanalytic subject is coextensive with that very flaw in the interior. (One could say that the psychoanalytic symptom, the starting point of analysis, is its most obvious manifestation). In short, the subject is precisely the failure to become the subject, — the psychoanalytic subject is the failure to become an Althusserian one.
For Althusser, the subject is what makes ideology work; for psychoanalysis, the subject emerges where ideology fails. The il1usion of autonomy may wel1 be necessary, but so is its failure; the cover-up never holds fast. The entire psychoanalytic apparatus starts from this point: different subjective structures that the psychoanalysis has discovered and described – neurosis (with its two faces of hysteria and obsession), psychosis, perversion — are just so many different ways to deal with that rest, with that impossibility to become the subject.
On the social level as well — on the level of discourse as a social bond — the four basic types of discourse pinpointed by Lacan are four different ways to tackle that remainder. Interpellation, on the other hand, is a way of avoiding it: it can explain its proper success, but not how and why it does not work.