Pierre Macherey Research Articles

Phases of Filipino Proletarianism in the 20th Century Dagling Tagalog: A Critique Using Pierre Macherey’s Theory of Gaps and Silences

Self-image is deeply rooted in one’s place in society, as manifested in one’s involvement in its facets and realities which are spoken of in literature, and yet it is the “unspoken” or the “unsaid”– the gaps and silences in the texts– that exposes the ‘unconscious’ of the work where lies a text’s repressed historical narrative and discourse. Accordingly, this study was targeted toward the deep understanding of how Filipinos see themselves and each other as Filipinos (self-image and self-identity) during the American colonization in the Philippines in the 20th century, specifically as proletarians, through the examination of the textual gaps and silences in dagling Tagalog texts written and published in the early 20th century. Using the post-structuralist Marxist theory of gaps and silences by Pierre Macherey, this paper discusses the subject formation of Filipino characters into the image of a proletarian and the phases of Filipino proletarianism. The results indicate that there are three phases to which Filipino proletarians are subjected: from False Consciousness to Recognition of Oppression, and finally to Revolution or Self-emancipation through carrying the “duty.” The study concludes that the texts are propagandist literature, with anti-government, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial sentiments hiding behind the mask of fiction and satire, emerging through the gaps and silences. Additionally, the portrayal of the Filipino proletariat in the texts is shaped by Marxist ideals of revolution, hence the inclination of the literary production of the texts towards the communist ideology.

Seeing Education in Indonesia: How Movie Represents the Inequality in Eastern Indonesia

There has been significant concern and constant debate about the education inequality in Eastern Indonesia, hence seeing its representation in the movie can be a way of voicing and negotiating the unspoken. This study aims to analyse the condition of education in Eastern Indonesia which is represented in the Indonesian films supported with data from other studies and analyse the correlation of the education condition with the national policies, as well as try to formulate solutions to this problem. The objects under study were the Indonesian films set in Eastern Indonesia including Denias Senandung di Atas Awan, Di Timur Matahari, Tanah Air Beta, and Aisyah: Biarkan Kami Bersaudara. The theory employed is the concept of Spoken and Unspoken of Pierre Macherey. The study went through the following steps: 1) classifying films set in Eastern Indonesia to determine the object of research; 2) analysing the representation of educational conditions in Eastern Indonesia in these films as a form of Spoken; and 3) analysing things that are not represented with the support of data from other research results as a form of Unspoken. The results showed: 1) education in Eastern Indonesia faces problems in terms of the school buildings condition, access to support, and the lack of teachers as teachers; 2) low participation in education in Eastern Indonesia is most likely attributed to poor implementation of the national Education Law, both Law Number 2 (Year 1989) and Law Number 20 (Year 2003); and 3) solution to the problem of education in Eastern Indonesia apart from the implementational issue of the law is the provision of educational scholarships for the best “sons and daughters” from the eastern part of the Archipelago to attend teacher trainings to ensure availability of teachers for their region.

In praise of functional morals and ethics

ABSTRACT Building on the moral economy of Andrew Sayer and Dave Elder-Vass, this article advocates for a functional (not functionalist) approach to morals and ethics, and consequently to economics. By choosing words responsibly it aims to be an example of the conscientious attitude it advocates. In the first section, I find that Andrew Sayer's approach dovetails with Pierre Macherey's – notably due to Sayer's linking of the biological dependency and vulnerability of humans to realist ethics, via the key word needs. Ditto for Dave Elder-Vass and Macherey for similar reasons. Simplifying, the second section examines the contrary of biological models of norms: juridical models of norms, especially Kant's jurisprudence and Leon Walras's pure economics. The third section, Les valeurs de la vie, showcases Elder-Vass on how to build a functional economy. Then it further supports Macherey's proposals drawing on two of his main sources, Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem.

A Loud Dance of Silence: The Unsaid of Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests

After being a British protectorate for nearly sixty years, in 1960, Nigeria gained independence the same year A Dance of the Forests was published. The play, which expresses ambivalence toward radical changes with premonitions between its lines, has been regarded as one of the most challenging to understand. With an eye on the work's historical context, it is treated as a symptom of history that reveals its "political unconscious" based on Fredrick Jameson's ideas. Furthermore, Pierre Macherey's Theory of Gaps highlights "the ideological project" of the literary work by focusing on the "unsaid" in the text, which shapes its "speech." In conclusion, regarding the synthesis of Jameson and Macherey's ideas, which reveals and studies the correlation between ideology and narrative, the article sets out to find the central topic of the work and describe the imaginary/symbolic system put into the service of the ideological project concerning its context.

Guided by Joy: Becoming-Active in Deleuze’s Spinoza

Spinoza’s Ethics makes reference to three kinds of knowledge that humans are capable of winning: imagination, reason and intuitive knowledge of God. Of these, imagination is necessarily inadequate while the latter two are necessarily adequate. In other words, we remain passive in the first type of knowledge, but come into our power of acting in the latter two. The passage from the first to the second and third types of knowledge, however, remains, in Spinoza’s text, rather obscure. This paper seeks to come to terms with how exactly the passage from passion to action is made in the Ethics while locating this particular problematic as a site at which various interpretations of Spinoza diverge with considerable stakes. I thus focus on Gilles Deleuze’s proposed answer to this problem as well as Pierre Macherey’s critique of Deleuze’s reading. I argue that the disagreement between Macherey and Deleuze is not merely interpretive, but rather indicates some of the stakes involved in assessing Spinoza’s theory of the passions and the imagination. An ‘optimistic’ appraisal of these features might lead one to Deleuze’s affirmationist project, while Macherey’s pessimism concerning the two might take a Spinozist politics in quite the opposite direction. I appreciate and assess multiple aspects of Macherey’s critique while nonetheless arguing that they do not prove damning for Deleuze’s affirmationist picture. I conclude with an analysis of vacillation of mind in Deleuze’s Spinoza, and place Deleuze’s thoughts on this note in conversation with his earlier reading of Nietzsche.

The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre by Peter J. Maurits

Reviewed by: The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre by Peter J. Maurits Thomas Waller Peter J. Maurits, The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022). 214 pages. Print and ebook. xiv + 214 pages. There is a long and high-quality tradition of English-language scholarship on Mozambican literature. The landmark publications of Hilary Owen's Mother Africa, Father Marx and Phillip Rothwell's A Postmodern Nationalist in the early 2000s set the benchmark for subsequent work in the field by analysing the subversion and redefinition of narratives of Mozambican nationhood, and the deconstruction of discourses of gender and sexuality, in the work of authors such as Noémia de Sousa, Lília Momplé, Paulina Chiziane, and Mia Couto. More recently, monographs by Eleanor Jones, Ana Margarida Martins, and Maria Tavares have carried forward this line of research with new work engaging the theory of biopolitics, the publishing dynamics of the global literary marketplace, and the legacy of the anti-colonial nationalist movement in Mozambique. While there are points of divergence and disagreement within this scholarship, two of its characteristic features are a preoccupation with the category of national identity and a theoretical affinity with postcolonial studies, a field in which the experiences of Portuguese-speaking African societies have historically been either under-represented or ignored. Each in their own [End Page 96] way, these scholars read Mozambican literature through the framework of the postcolonial nation-state, which the texts are then seen alternately to challenge, re-examine, contest, or deconstruct. Peter J. Maurits's new book The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story approaches Mozambican literature from a different perspective. Published in Peter Lang's book series 'Reconfiguring Identities in the Portuguese-speaking World', its orientation does not come from postcolonial theory, nor is it principally concerned with the themes of gender and sexuality, and while it has much to say about the trajectory of Mozambican nationhood, its scope transcends the bounding limits of the national framework to encompass a global horizon of political economy. The structure of the book is organized in five chapters of more or less equal length. The first chapter introduces key concepts and summarizes the monograph's thesis, that there exists a 'Mozambican modern ghost story'. The second chapter then presents the category of the modern ghost story through an analysis of the work of Walter Scott, with a particular focus on his 1827 short story 'The Highland Widow'. The third chapter identifies prototypes of the Mozambican modern ghost story in the work of the nineteenth-century poet Campos de Oliveira and in Orlando Mendes's important 1966 episodic novel Portagem. The fourth chapter theorizes the consolidation of the Mozambican modern ghost story proper in the period of the late 1980s, when Mozambique was transitioning from Marxism-Leninism to free-market capitalism. Finally, the fifth chapter argues, through a close reading of Mia Couto's novel O outro pé da sereia, that the Mozambican modern ghost story re-emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century to respond to the economic effects of neoliberal globalization. One of the virtues of Maurits's book is that it engages with two traditions that have received relatively short shrift in English-language work on Mozambican literature: Marxist social theory and world-literary studies. The first two sentences of The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story establish its argument at the outset at the intersection of these two fields: 'This book will argue that a Mozambican modern ghost story exists and that it registers primitive accumulation. It shows how literary form—a genre—can alter when it moves, temporally and spatially, through the world-literary system, and reacts with different forms and raw materials' (p. ix). A materialist commitment to the theory and critique of global capitalism is thereby paired with a sensitivity to the unevenness of the production and circulation of world-literary texts in a system stratified by power and inequality. Whereas the former preoccupation leads Maurits to theories of the aesthetic mediation of capitalist social form, and to the likes of Fredric Jameson and Pierre Macherey, the latter leads him to world...

THE INCESSANT CRISIS: A MACHEREYAN READING OF MARY SHELLEY S THE LAST MAN

First published in 1826, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is a dystopian novel that depicts the life of Lionel Verney in 2100, who is living in the last days of the Anthropocene as the human population has been eradicated due to a pandemic. While the novel is regarded as the first post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, it had been neglected until the 1960s. Despite owing its context to the nineteenth century, the novel addresses several modern-man issues. The anxiety produced by apocalyptic visions and the fear of extinction are two of the significant twenty-first-century issues due to the ecological crisis and COVID-19 pandemic, which are accurately relatable. Moreover, Lionel’s existential dread and identity crisis represent and predict the confusion of modern man. Since the work was written a century before the twenty-first century’s traumatic incidents, its perspective on the twenty-first-century man’s issues is outstanding. In this study, The Last Man would be scrutinized in the light of Pierre Macherey’s post-Marxist theory of gaps to see the socio-political elements addressed by the novel that aided Shelley in predicting successive generations’ miseries. Moreover, it is discussed if the twenty-first-century man, situated in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, could escape the ecological crisis and build a better future on earth by attending political changes.

Literature as a Matter of Policy

Literature as a Matter of Policy

The Violence of the Frame: Image, Animal, Interval in Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac

The Violence of the Frame:Image, Animal, Interval in Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac Steven Swarbrick (bio) All authentic reading is in its own way violent, or it is nothing but the complaisance of a paraphrase. — Pierre Macherey (113) Imago, n. 1. a. Entomology. The final or adult stage in the development of an insect, during which it is sexually mature. 2. Psychoanalysis. A subjective image of someone (esp. a parent) which a person has subconsciously formed and which continues to influence his or her attitudes and behavior. —Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. What is a nymph, and how do we recognize her/its appearance in Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013)?1 The film's title—spelled Nymph()maniac—points to a difference without recognition. I am referring to the parenthetical lips that hollow out the film's center. Those lips, when read through a Foucauldian lens of power-knowledge-pleasure, are certainly not the same lips that, in saying yes to sex, believe they are saying no to power. The lips of von Trier's title do not speak the truth of one's sexual identity, much less the protagonist Joe's (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Instead, suspicious of the repressive hypothesis and its attendant sex-positive formulations, the lips of Nymphomaniac are more akin to the lips theorized in Luce Irigaray's essay "When Our Lips Speak Together," which posits a sexual ethics based on difference and self-fracture rather than a unified politics of the One. At the center of my question, then, there is a (w)hole fractured by two parentheticals. And yet the interval that interrupts my question is the same interval that arouses so much speculation about [End Page 131] the future of the image, as theorized by Jacques Rancière, and the image of life at the heart of biopolitics. Rancière frames the question of the image and its future in terms of the "interstice" and its distribution. Following Gilles Deleuze, Rancière states, "Thenceforward, what creates the link is the absence of the link: the interstice between images commands a re-arrangement from the void and not a sensory-motor arrangement" (Film Fables 108). Rancière continues his post-Deleuzian investigation into "the interstice between images" in The Future of the Image, where he is primarily concerned with the category of the new, that is, with what the image can be after the breakdown of the sensory-motor link between images. Notably, this absence of the link is also what governs the image of life within biopolitics, as "life itself" tends more and more toward molecularization and the recombination of elements (Myers 2015).2 Rancière highlights the connection between "life itself" and the image-link problematic in his essay on Deleuze, in which he calls Deleuze's cinema books works of "natural history." My goal—somewhat at odds with Rancière's—is to embrace Deleuze's notion of the image-link problematic by tracing the propulsive force of nature's queer negativity, the interval or gap between images, in von Trier's cinema. What creates the link in Nymphomaniac is the absence of the link—nature's hollow center. Among the first to read nature's absent center was Spinoza. According to Warren Montag, Spinoza reads nature in the same way he reads Scripture, by paying painstaking attention to the materiality of the letter, its gaps and contradictions—in a word, its form. Spinoza shows that there is not a coherent, undivided meaning beyond or behind the letter of the text, but a swarming assemblage of material bodies whose swarming encircles a void—text without substance. Montag relates Spinoza's reading practice to a series of natural disasters: Spinoza's method has been compared to an archaeology but, if anything, it resembles the activity of modern paleontology which in place of the gradual, uniform and continuous evolution imagined by Darwin … has restored to the fossil record its gaps and discontinuities, and in the process demonstrated the existence of a natural history replete with catastrophes and reversals. (11) This chain of catastrophes tells us how Spinoza's philosophy of reading connects to his metaphysics: nature is not a self-present totality...

Disjecta Membra: Althusser’s Aestethics Reconsidered

This essay takes a synthetic and critical approach to the scattered pieces of art criticism and aesthetic theory authored by Louis Althusser. Connecting these texts to his larger philosophical and political project, we argue that these reflections make an independent contribution to its worth and that they offer different perspectives on lingering theoretical problems. We piece together the insights that form the core of the Althusserian approach to aesthetics and show how these are formulated (in connection with the work of Pierre Macherey as well as the dominant controversies of the time) and trace how their formulations take shape in relation to the work of different authors and artists. In addition to helping us better understand his overall project, Althusser’s aesthetic theory is, we argue, a powerful and original contribution to Marxist aesthetics. Specifically, it points us to the idea that we need to take aesthetic production seriously as a practice with its own specificity – one that has its own logics of determination, rituals of production, circulation, and consumption, one that commands effects that need to be theorized on their own terms.

The Squid and the Lentil: A-Hundred-and-Fifty Years under the Sea

Abstract On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869–70), this article traces three vectors of Verne's, and the novel's, influence, in relation to three genres or modes of writing: science fiction, as it began to emerge as a sharply delineated category in the early twentieth century; French literary theory and philosophy, in which Verne's work appeared as a favorite touchstone of influential writers including Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Macherey; and weird fiction, for which Twenty Thousand Leagues, with its monstrous squid, has been retroactively constructed as a (minor) foundational text.

Laundering Treasure in Stevenson'sTreasure Island

In R. L. Stevenson's Treasure Island, the motif of the treasure hunt resonates strongly with the economic realities of eighteenth-century Britain, particularly when viewed within the context of the British joint venture boom. This boom erupted in its most hysterical form in the ‘South Sea Company Craze’ of 1720. In Stevenson's fiction, overseas joint ventures and high seas piracy share certain implicit commonalities, though one of these is never mentioned – or, more accurately, it is repressed. In Pierre Macherey's terms, this repressed element constitutes a non-dit of the fiction, something without which the text could not have been written, yet whose manifest presence would also have made the text impossible. At the centre of this constituting-yet-absent history, a shady commodity lurks: the trade in human merchandise, whose sales fill the English coffers with Spanish silver and gold. Attempting to articulate what Stevenson's pirate story could not say, this article probes its displaced politico-economic history, concluding that the novel's exotic treasure hunt serves as an ideological alibi for the profit-laundering of its trade in human slaves.

Literature for Class Reproduction: Balibar and Macherey’s “On Literature as an Ideological Form”

전 세계적 자본주의가 완성된 현재야말로 자본주의 비판으로서의 마르크스주의가 본격적으로 시작되어야 할 시점이다. 마찬가지 이유로 마르크스주의 문학 비평도 이제 본격적으로 시작되어야 한다. 기존의 마르크스주의 문학 비평이 별 성과를 거두지 못한 이유는 문학 물신주의에 몰입되어 있는 부르주아 문학관에서 벗어나지 못하고 있었기 때문이다. 마르크스주의 문학론을 정립하기 위해서는 문학에서의 계급투쟁, 즉 부르주아 계급이 피지배계급에 대하여 벌이는 비가시적인 계급투쟁을 주목하여야 한다. 이 논문은 지배계급이 주도하는 계급투쟁을 문학 영역에서 분석하는 에티엔 발리바르와 피에르 마슈레가 함께 쓴 이데올로기 형체로서의 문학에 대하여 를 주목한다. 발리바르와 마슈레는 국가의 교육 기구가 문학 교육을 통하여 피지배 계급을 지배 계급에 종속시킴을 그들의 논문에서 밝히고 있다. 이들은 문학의 역할이 피지배 계급의 언어와 이데올로기를 지배 계급의 언어와 이데올로기에 포섭되게 하는 것임을 밝힌다. 이로써 문학이 현존하는 지배 체제를 재생산하게 한 다는 것이다. 발리바르와 마슈레의 문학 이론이 시사하는 바는 마르크스주의 문학비평가의 시급한 과제가 계급 재생산 기능을 수행하는 문학의 이데올로기적 작용을 드러내 밝히는 것임을 말해준다. 마르크스주의 문학 비평가는 문학 텍스트의 내 적 파열이나 전복을 말하는 문학의 구조 이론에서 벗어나서 지배 계급의 편에서 벌이는 문학의 계급투쟁에 관심을 기울여야 한다고 이 논문은 주장한다.Marxism as a critique of capitalism is urgently in need today when capitalism has reached its highest stage on a global scale, even though or just because historical Marxism has declined throughout the globe. Likewise, Marxist literary criticism is in need for a proper critique of bourgeois literature that functions to reproduce the ruling class ideology for the reproduction of the current capitalist social system. This essay aims at, first of all, demystifying literary fetishism and then constructing a proper Marxist literary criticism for the critique of capitalist ideological reproduction system in literature. For this, this essay recalls Étienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey’s coauthored “On Literature as an Ideological Form,” almost a bypassed literary theory even among Marxist literary theoreticians. This essay reads Balibar and Macherey’s literary theory in the trail of Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” and argues that literature is an ideological state apparatus for the reproduction of the class division and reproduction in society. With an expository reviewing Balibar and Macherey’s article in the tradition of philosophy and Marxist literary theory, this essay argues that the imminent task of Marxist literary critics should be to disclose the ideological function of literature in the class struggle for the ruling class rather than hastily reading absences or subversions in literature. The capitalist ruling system does not go away with Marxist critics’ historical optimism in reading literary texts; the urgent task should be to demystify the ideological function of literature in the capitalist society.

Looking through the Corners

This paper presents the role of Althusser and two of his students in the 1960s, Pierre Macherey and Dominique Lecourt, in the diffusion of the work of Georges Canguilhem in Brazil. We begin by a brief review of Macherey’s and Lecourt’s analysis on the work of Canguilhem taken from two texts that served as postface and preface to the Brazilian and the Argentine translations of Le normal et le pathologique. Next, we present the works ofBrazilian authors Sérgio Arouca, Cecilia Donnangelo and Ricardo Bruno Mendes-Gonçalves to show some aspects of the reception of Canguilhem’s ideas and concepts in the field of Collective Health.

What is Poststructuralism?

In this article, I discuss the vitality and the limits of the poststructural archive. I argue against the temptation to essentialise poststructuralism or define its ‘ontology’; instead, I present some of the avenues that can be taken to further its theoretical practice. With Trump and the rise of ‘post-truth’ politics, poststructural political thought has recently come back to the centre of political debate. By using Pierre Macherey and François Châtelet’s perspective on Marxism, I turn to contemporary problems and studies to imagine how to renew the poststructuralist experience of thought. Following Boris Groys, I suggest that by producing theory as form, artists had a more immediate recourse to theoretical practice, by using all sorts of media to perform knowledge. Finally, by mainly referring to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, I present some elements of a poststructural critique of political economy. I do this not by forcing the application of poststructural theories or concepts onto a supposedly external reality, but by immanently integrating more and more social and political problems into the schemes of thought. A poststructural theoretical practice means integrating into thought problems and events, in order to compose with them, and not simply study discursive strategies.

MENGUNGKAP KEBUNGKAMAN DALAM PRODUKTIVITAS FIKSI POP ISLAMI PENERBIT MIZAN

This research focus on the discourse of Syiah that alleged to Mizan over the first publication of Dialog Sunni-Syiah which published at 1983. Despite of that negative justification, Mizan publisher still exist and productive, especially for producing pop-islamic fiction. By using Pierre Macherey’s literary production theory, spoken and unspoken, then found a ideological islamization project and also an anti-western effort in the other pop-islamic fiction by realizing it through figuration and symbol inside the text; hidayah, islam figure, moslem gathering, ideal by wearing hijab, Arabian’s figure domination, history of islamic resistance, and preferring middle east background. Therefore, unconsciously, pop-islamic fiction reducing the negative image of Mizan as pop-islamic publisher as well as showing the existence of islamic power. Mizan’s presence appears because of the enthusiasm of intellectuals to the islamic ideas books, especially about Islam Iran Revolution at 1979. By the sensitivity of the discourse in Orde Baru era, then Mizan publisher be a part of negative image in islam. By the Mizan’s productivity producing pop books then the more the image faded, simultaneously awaken islamic power in Indonesia’s popular culture.Keywords: Pop-islamic fiction, Mizan Publisher, spoken and unspoken , silences

MENGUNGKAP KEBUNGKAMAN DALAM PRODUKTIVITAS FIKSI POP ISLAMI PENERBIT MIZAN

This research focus on the discourse of Syiah that alleged to Mizan over the first publication of Dialog Sunni-Syiah which published at 1983. Despite of that negative justification, Mizan publisher still exist and productive, especially for producing pop-islamic fiction. By using Pierre Macherey’s literary production theory, spoken and unspoken, then found a ideological islamization project and also an anti-western effort in the other pop-islamic fiction by realizing it through figuration and symbol inside the text; hidayah, islam figure, moslem gathering, ideal by wearing hijab, Arabian’s figure domination, history of islamic resistance, and preferring middle east background. Therefore, unconsciously, pop-islamic fiction reducing the negative image of Mizan as pop-islamic publisher as well as showing the existence of islamic power. Mizan’s presence appears because of the enthusiasm of intellectuals to the islamic ideas books, especially about Islam Iran Revolution at 1979. By the sensitivity of the discourse in Orde Baru era, then Mizan publisher be a part of negative image in islam. By the Mizan’s productivity producing pop books then the more the image faded, simultaneously awaken islamic power in Indonesia’s popular culture.Keywords: Pop-islamic fiction, Mizan Publisher, spoken and unspoken , silences

Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry. Katherine C. Little. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. vii+256.

<i>Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry</i>. Katherine C. Little. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. vii+256.

Silence, an Eye of Knowledge

One of the conspicuous features of the twentieth-century West was silence. This idea could be supported by examining reflections of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Fritz Mauthner, John Cage, Samuel Beckett, Ihab Hassan, Franz Kafka, Wassily Kandinsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Virginia Woolf, Wolfgang Iser, Jacques Derrida, and Pierre Macherey. To me, silence is not a mere theory, but rather a phenomenon from which we can get practical benefits. I believe silence is an eye, eye of knowledge. We can broaden our knowledge of the world through silence. To convey the idea that silence is an eye, I have concocted the word slence, where  has replaced the letter i and stands for the eye. This means knowledge can enable us to see, thereby acquiring knowledge of, what used to be invisible, and accordingly unknowable. In other words, through silence, we can achieve a certain type of literacy. I substantiate this claim by exploring the Horus myth, Ojo de Dios, John Cage’s 4' 33", the nature of Expressionist paintings, Hinduism, thoughts of Hermes Trismegistus and Ibn al-Arabi, and practices of Mohammad, the prophet of Islam.

Individuals Interpellable and Uninterpellable: Reflections on James R. Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject

Individuals Interpellable and Uninterpellable: Reflections on James R. Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject Warren Montag (bio) Martel, James R. The Misinterpellated Subject. Duke UP, 2017. James R. Martel’s The Misinterpellated Subject is a work of great interest, and not simply for those seeking to apply Althusser’s theory of interpellation beyond its sphere of origin. For those of us who, more cautiously (perhaps too cautiously), have limited ourselves to an attempt to excavate and examine Althusser’s strange formulation, convinced that it remains in certain important ways unintelligible, Martel’s notion of misinterpellation poses new and very welcome questions. First among these is the question or problem of the untranslatability of the word most associated with Althusser’s project, the word “interpellation,” and the effects of this untranslatability on our understanding of Althusser’s entire theory of ideology and ideological subjection. In fact, I would argue, not as a criticism, but by way of a recognition of the necessary materiality of discourses, that the text’s most effective formulations appear in those places where it demonstrably mistranslates (or simply adopts pre-existing mistranslations of) Althusser’s notion of interpellation. This is not to say that Martel’s basic assumptions are simply wrong, or, in contrast, that he has replaced, perhaps without knowing that he has done so, the Althusserian account of interpellation with something more powerful or true. Althusser’s notion of interpellation is irreducibly contradictory and complex, and its complexity is indistinguishable from the theoretical specificity and singularity that give it its power. If Martel’s study constantly poses questions to Althusser, it does so without necessarily formulating them as such and exhibits a way of thinking that, in my view, can be fully realized and put to work only when it is examined in the light of Althusser’s discussion of ideology in the essay “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses.” There is nothing more Althusserian than this apparent paradox: as he wrote with reference to Canguilhem, the history of science, and we might add, the history of concepts and knowledges, has a bit more imagination than any logic of scientific discovery. Not very long ago, Pierre Macherey wrote that the text that Althusser published in 1970 under the title, ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,’ where the thesis of the interpellation of the individual as a subject is advanced for the first time, while undoubtedly one of his most innovative, is also particularly disconcerting. Its exposition, by exploiting a rhetoric that combines ellipses with a kind of rhetorical violence, results in the construction of an enigmatic space that the reader must decipher for himself. (51)1 The fact that Macherey, who was a participant in the discussions that led to the formation of the concept of interpellation, can describe the ISAs essay as an “enigmatic space” will undoubtedly surprise Anglophone readers, few if any of whom have found it particularly enigmatic. Martel’s citations and arguments may well help us recover an appreciation of the difficulties of Althusser’s text by “making speak” its ellipses and its forcing of concepts and images. We might start by acknowledging the fact that we do not exactly know what the term “interpellation,” as used in English, much more than in French (or Spanish), means: what are its synonyms or antonyms, for what words can it be substituted? I do not recapitulate here the effects of translating the French word “interpellation” as “interpellation,” a word that had all but disappeared from the English language, where in any case it never possessed the semantic range that it did and does in French (Montag, “Signifier”). Few English speakers could have made any sense at all of the term without the addition of “hail” (no equivalent of which exists in the French text), which translator Ben Brewster decided, without any indication that he had done so, to add as a synonym of interpellation. The result: for decades no one thought to ask what interpellation means in French: everyone knew it meant “hail.” Ben Brewster’s translation gave us a text very different from the French text, and not only because of the repeated coupling of “interpellation” and “hail” in the places where the...