#interpellation

"It is at this level that we should also locate the phenomenon of misinterpellation elaborated by James Martel.[5] Misinterpellation works in two directions: a subject recognizes him/herself in an interpellation that wasn’t even effectively enunciated but just imagined by him/her, like the fundamentalist who recognizes himself in a call of god (however, one can argue that this case is universal—does the interpellated subject generally not imagine the big Other [god, country, etc.] which addresses him/her?); and a subject recognizes him/herself in an interpellation which didn’t target him, as in the well-known anecdote about how Che Guevara became minister of economy (at an inner circle meeting immediately after the victory of the revolution, Fidel asked “Is there an economist here among you?” and Che quickly replied “Yes!” confusing “economist” with “Communist”). A more pertinent example here is the interpellation of individuals into subjects of human rights: when black slaves in Haiti recognized themselves as the subjects of human rights declared by the French Revolution, they of course in some sense “missed the point”—the fact that, although universal in their form (“all men”), human rights effectively privileged white men of property; however, this very “misreading” had explosive emancipatory consequences. This is what Hegel’s Cunning of Reason is about: human rights were “really meant” to be accepted only by white men of property, but their universal form was their truth. It was thus the first interpellation which was wrong, but the true interpellation could only actualize itself through the false one, as its secondary misreading." - Slavoj Zizek (Bureaucracy as a Machine of Jouissance)