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Inception or Interpellation? The Slovenian School, Butler, and Althusser

Critics of Louis Althusser ask why an interpellated individual turns around. With this question, Mladen Dolar, among others, tries to establish the intermediary stage of “belief before belief” or “subject before subject.” However, Althusser's position is that such a circularity of “X before X” is not the cause but the retroactive effect of interpellation: the subject teleologically projects the imposed identity to its eternal past, thereby falling into the illusion of causa sui (the subject before itself). In this regard, Althusser's position is not so different from Jacques Lacan's. Applying a double standard to them, Dolar betrays Lacan's own logic of retroaction and regresses into the logic of inception. Judith Butler clearly recognizes the ontological impossibility of positing subject before subject, but she wants to reserve the tropological possibility of designating one and attempts to turn this possibility into the source of resistance. This article investigates why Althusser did not choose to go this way.