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. (shrink)

James Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject attempts to productively expand upon Althusser’s theory of interpellation through the development of a concept Martel calls “misinterpellation.” Martel puts this concept to use to develop a critical mode of reading as part of an explicitly political project, which Martel links with anarchism. The book is lofty in its ambitions, but the most interesting aspects of Martel’s book are buried beneath less compelling passages of literary criticism.

James Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject attempts to productively expand upon Althusser’s theory of interpellation through the development of a concept Martel calls “misinterpellation.” Martel puts this concept to use to develop a critical mode of reading as part of an explicitly political project, which Martel links with anarchism. The book is lofty in its ambitions, but the most interesting aspects of Martel’s book are buried beneath less compelling passages of literary criticism.

In his parable “Abraham,” Franz Kafka offers us a narrative wherein the call that motivates Abraham to attempt to sacrifice his son Isaac is not perceived by Abraham alone but has many other, unintended interlocutors as well. Kafka tells us that besides the “real Abraham”—that is, the one that we all know about, someone who “already had everything, and yet was to be raised still higher” —there is “another Abraham” or possibly even several other Abrahams. One other Abraham, Kafka tells (...) us, “was prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but was unable to bring it off because he could not get away, being indispensable; the.. (shrink)