In his well-written and well-argued book, James R. Martel points our attention to the one out of 10 times when the hailing “hey, you there!” of the police officer in the classic Althusserian scene of interpellation misses its intended individual. This one individual who (mis)believes that the call was meant for him or her is the misinterpellated subject. That person showing up at and not going away from the scene of interpellation breaks the circuit of interpellative authority and thereby exposes its weakness. He or she is the failed subject of liberal capitalism, the one nobody wants to be but we all are. This failure is productive, because it ruins the story of interpellation (sometimes by accident and sometimes deliberately), and when turned into a more widespread strategy, can lead to radical sociopolitical changes.

The first part of the book shows us how interpellation and resistance to interpellation works by engaging with historical examples of misinterpellation, such as the “French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” that was not meant for its colonized subjects. However, the Haitian slaves answered its call anyway, which sparked the Haitian Revolution and, in turn, the French Revolution. Similarly, Woodrow Wilson’s call for self-determination, which was meant for Europeans and not the colonies they exploited, incited anticolonial movements. He also engages with the racist call directed at Frantz Fanon, “tien, un Negre! (look, a Negro!),” and discusses Fanon as a paradigmatic example of the misinterpellated subject.

In the second part, Martel turns to literature and film to explain how a breakdown of interpellation produces “anarchist subjects.” Here, he also explores alternative calls that displace the dominance of the “hey, you there!” These include Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, whose call “[a person] is something that shall be overcome,” which cancels out the false subject we are told to be; the “I prefer not to” of Hermann Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” that allows an “uncalling” from liberal capitalist calls of what we have to do and be; and the “come, come!” of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which invites multiple subjectivities instead of the unitary subject of interpellation to emerge.

The Misinterpellated Subject makes a significant contribution to contemporary political theorizing, for several reasons. First, Martel shows us that processes of liberal interpellation are linked to the violence inherent in the project of (neo)liberal capitalism. He exposes the falsity and phantasmatic nature of liberal universals (such as rights, freedom, and self-determination), from which most are excluded. His book is an important corrective to the lack of a rigorous critique of liberal capitalism on the left (including political theorists), which has arranged itself with free market capitalism. His critique is of utmost necessity in these times when the Far Right has managed to deliver a false critique of capitalism to shore up its electoral success. Second, Martel shows us that the challenge to the unified and centered subject of liberal capitalism does not mean that we should or can give up on the subject altogether, as some contemporary political theorists have called for. Rather, we must theorize an alternative subject that emerges out of subjects’ own particular communities and struggles, to displace the individual subject of liberalism, and to envision transformative agency (p. 112).

Third, the author draws not only on political theory and philosophy and historical examples in real politics but also on a wide variety of literature to explain his theoretical framework. His approach is a corrective to tendencies in Anglo-American political theory to dismiss literature as proper material for political theorizing, which leads to an impoverishing of political theory itself. Fourth, he shows us how revolutions are often sparked by non-elites, such as Mohamed Bouazazi’s act of self-immolation, which sparked the Tunisian Revolution and the Arab Spring more generally (Chapter 2). Finally, his idea of the “misinterpellation of everyday life” (p. 23) alerts us that everyday practices of resistance by ordinary people have preceded more spectacular events, such as revolutions, which reminds us that our own everyday failures and refusals of interpellative authority can, in the long run, lead to radical change.

There are also a few concerns I have with Martel’s ambitious project, however. First, since for the author the rebellious subjects emerge at the same time they subject themselves to power (p. 22), it remains difficult within his theorizing to envision when transformative agency becomes a possibility. I suggest that limit concepts, such as the moment of non-identity (Adorno) or the Real (Lacan), which are lacking in Louis Althusser and Butler (upon whom Martel heavily draws), would allow him to further theorize that the law and the forms of interpellation it engenders “possesses a flaw, a crack in its façade of unimpeachable omniscience and authority” (p. 37). Whereas the anarchist (or misinterpellated) subject emerges in this crack, which I call the moment of the limit in power, the subjected subject emerges at the moment of subjection to power (Power and Feminist Agency, Chapter 2).

Second, I fully agree with Martel that we must challenge the liberal capitalist notion of the subject as unitary, whole, and internally harmonious (pp. 6, 158–59, 163). However, his “anarchist” subject, which he depicts throughout the book as a “constantly shifting,” “fluid” (p. 195), “always in flux” (pp. 210, 241), and “uncertain” (pp. 97, 134) subject, who leads to an anarchist practice of conspiracy that is equally depicted as an “unstable and shifting set of relationships” (pp. 239, 271), and “fluid” (p. 249), does not allow us to transform neoliberal capitalism. Rather, such a subject and the practice he or she engages in is firmly entrenched in its workings. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously showed us that a fluid subject and practice is the hallmark of liberal capitalism with its “everlasting uncertainty,” a world where “all that is solid melts into air.” This process finds it fullest expression in neoliberal capitalism with its flexible networks. Again, limit concepts, such as non-identity and the Real could assist Martel in theorizing the anarchist subject, without promoting the highly problematic notion of the constantly shifting or fluid subject. I call such a subject the subject-in-outline, a figure that moves within the tension of permanent openness to counter its exclusionary character, while simultaneously maintaining a minimal coherence necessary for political agency (Chapter 3 in my book).

Third, Martel makes the important observation that the strategy that people of color and colonized subjects must use to resist racist interpellations is not failure, which is reserved for privileged white subjects (such as the figure of Karl in Kafka’s America). Rather, people of color must use the strategy of refusal—they refuse the accusation inherent in their hailing and instead turn to identities that compete with and supersede their imposed subjectivities. Almost all of the examples Martel uses to discuss strategies of refusal refer to black men (such as Fanon, the black men murdered by police in the United States, the narrator in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me). However, in her critique on the Black Lives Matter movement, Shatema Threadcraft (“Embodiment,” in Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, 2016, pp. 207–226) shows us that black femicide is largely ignored, because it occurs in the private sphere away from public eye. Considering her critique, I wonder how the strategy of refusal might differ for women of color? Martel invokes (white) women in his examples of misinterpellated subjects (Bess McNeil in Lars Von Trier’s Breaking the Waves , and Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse), and (in a short paragraph) suggests that the anarchist subject has affinities with Luce Irigaray’s female subject who is not one (p. 235). Nevertheless, he does not specifically address female subjectivity.

Fourth, I agree with Martel’s suggestion that we must realize that we all fail as subjects to break the spell of liberal capitalist ideology, where one’s class position is seen as exclusively one’s own fault (p. 17). However, recognizing that failure might be an easier task for a person who, in the eyes of liberal capitalism, is not a failed subject (such as a tenured professor in the academy). It might be different for a person who daily feels that he or she is a failure in the eyes of liberal capitalist society—such as the person living on the streets or in a trailer park, or the person who works three jobs and can barely survive. In this connection, one could give a different reading to Kafka’s “other Abraham,” whom Martel reads as a core example of the misinterpellated subject—one who radically questions the authority of the caller. Abraham’s fear of being ridiculed and laughed at might make him seem even older and uglier and even less worthy of the call when he shows up on the scene, even though the call is not meant for him, is a possibility that Martel seems to dismiss (p. 3). One might read this as the cruel laughter of neoliberal capitalism at “failed” subjects. However, such fear of ridicule and the actual feelings of failure might not lead to radical changes, but on the contrary, as we see in contemporary politics, can be successfully exploited by far right politicians who promise to make them “great again,” which allows at least a temporary relief from such feelings.

Finally, Martel makes the important argument that we must make misrecognition impossible to uncover what it shields from our view: the misinterpellated subject, which challenges contemporary theorists who draw on the concept of misrecognition to theorize resistance. Furthermore, he exposes the ways in which recognition is linked to interpellation, and as such implicated in police brutality and murder (p. 94), the reinforcement of white dominance (p. 107), colonial violence (p. 118), and the false idea of a whole and unified subject (p. 186, 273)—a critique which I support myself (Chapter 6 in my book).

Despite his critique of recognition/misrecognition, however, throughout The Misinterpellated Subject Martel holds onto the possibility of “mutual recognition” (Chapters 3–7), which goes hand in hand with his repeated assertions that the anarchist subject can “choose” its identities (pp. 115, 157, 253, 245). It seems that Martel himself is here subject to the lure of liberal capitalist ideology, the messiah in the form of the possibility of recognition and choice. Yet, as he shows us in his excellent discussion of Nietzsche’s anti-messiah, we need to get rid of any hope of salvation that rests on the belief that we can, after all, achieve total recognition, and we must reject the liberal capitalist language of choice. His account of the misinterpellated subject certainly does not need such false hopes to make an important contribution to contemporary political theorizing.