A Political Theology of Interpellation: On Subjection, Individuation, and Becoming Nothing

Abstract:This essay argues for the political-theological significance of Louis Althusser's theory of interpellation by analyzing the import of the "Christian religious ideology" in his argument. It suggests that the subject as a complex dispositif—of (self-)recognition in relation to a transcendent call, which bestows a proper name, a place in the world, and freedom in obedience—anchors both the Christian and the secular domains. In reconstructing the subject's constitutive elements, this essay argues that interpellation does not merely recruit individuals but itself acts as an operation of individuation. Moreover, the interpellative matrix of the subject works as a sorting mechanism that segregates those who cohere as subjects from those who do not. Turning to the fourteenth-century mystical figure Meister Eckhart, the essay theorizes deinterpellation as a delegitimating force against the interplays of transcendence and subjection wherever they are operative. Rather than opening the self to a transcendent call, Eckhartian deinterpellative becoming nothing affirms an anoriginary freedom detached from the entire matrix uniting interpellative transcendence and the subject.