For the Love of Guilt: Interpellation and Black Lalangue

Critical examinations of Louis Althusser’s conceptualization of “interpellation” have circulated within and beyond philosophical circles since 1971. Amongst the best known are Butler’s modifications on behalf of a burgeoning gender theory and Dolar’s Lacanian criticism. While little existing scholarship has sought to bring these responses to bear on one another beyond marking their evident differences, this essay seeks revival of Althusser’s Freudo-Lacanian influences, drawing psychoanalytic thinking on guilt together with queer theory and Black critical thought so as to discern beloved ideological guilt (a certain white guilt) and resistant (but no less ideological) queer guilt from the singular guiltiness of the Black colonial subject—per David Marriott: “A n’est pas [is not] that pits being a subject against the Other who is black.” In pulling these guilts apart, I question why non-Black guilt is beloved or cared after in its effacement of jouissance, as well as how Blackness both interrupts ideology and subjectivity (as an unassimilable irony) and underlies it (as if bound to a permanent and loveless guilt).