"It is at this level that we should also locate the phenomenon ofĀ misinterpellationĀ elaborated by James Martel.[5]Ā Misinterpellation works in two directions: a subject recognizes him/herself in an interpellation that wasnāt 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 universalādoes 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 didnāt 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 āIs there an economist here among you?ā and Che quickly replied āYes!ā confusing āeconomistā with āCommunistā). 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 āmissed the pointāāthe fact that, although universal in their form (āall menā), human rights effectively privileged white men of property; however, this very āmisreadingā had explosive emancipatory consequences. This is what Hegelās Cunning of Reason is about: human rights were āreally meantā 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)
