Void for a Subject: Althusser’s Machiavelli and the Concept of “Political Interpellation”

This essay argues that Louis Althusser, in his posthumously published Machiavelli and Us, put forth a new concept of interpellation that significantly innovated on his previous theory of the interpellated subject as presented in the famous 1970 essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” This new concept, which I will call “political interpellation,” is best understood against the background of two strands in Althusser’s philosophy: first, his engagement in the early 1960s with the notions of “contingency,”“beginning,” and “novelty” via Machiavelli; and second, his reflections on philosophy as a form of discourse, in the wake of his reflections on a theory of discourses dating from 1966