Understanding and Interpellation
Understanding and Interpellation

Summary/Abstract: This article by Rastko Močnik on ideological interpellation, written in 2013, is one of the testaments to how much our understanding of the critique of ideology owes to our encounter with this remarkable thinker. Regrettably, during the past decade, though passed from hand to hand, it remained in manuscript, kept in our archives – first at the Institute for Critical Social Studies (Močnik was Co-Chair of its International Board of Directors) and then at the Institute for Critical Theories of Supermodernity. Arguably, the article summarizes the essence of his theory as he developed it during those years in a series of lectures at the Universities of Sofia and Plovdiv. Revisiting the Althusserian problem of ideological interpellation, Močnik starts from the problem of orientation towards another’s discourse and of what he calls “double inscription” of discursive sequences; goes through some of his past solutions (relying primarily on Oswald Ducrot’s theory of argumentation in language), and through Deyan Deyanov’s theory of pre-predicative self-evidences of thought and the chances of proposing a new solution based on it; and, finally, analyzes in microscopic detail several case studies to arrive at the interesting conclusion that we need to distinguish between a “reproductive ideological interpellation by identification”, and a “disruptive interpellation by subjectivation”. What will Močnik’s theory offer us from now on and what awaits us in our dialogue with it? Only the future can tell.

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