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The word interpellation is used in three senses. It has been adopted from French and may

remain indebted to its original, which also has a fourth sense.

In the context of Social Science to be Interpellated is to recognise ones-self as that particular

idea or identity being invoked. For example, if someone were to shout your name at you in thestreet, you would recognize that salutation to mean yourself. It is basically thinking 'that means

me'. It is the process by which you recognise yourself to belong to a particular identity.

Interpellation is a concept of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser to describe the process by

which ideology addresses the (abstract) pre-ideological individual thus effectively producing him

or her as subject proper. Henceforth, Althusser goes against the classical definition of the subject

as cause and substance: in other words, the situation always precedes the (individual or

collective) subject, which precisely as subject is "always-already interpellated". Althusser's

argument here strongly draws from Jacques Lacan's concept of the Mirror stage. Althusser's

concept has been roundly confused over the last decades with concepts and thinking associated

with Michel Foucault, in part because both thinkers manifest an antihumanist insistence on the

secondary status of the subject as mere effect of social relations and not vice versa. Another

source of this confusion, as elaborated in an article by Keith Sawyer (2002) is the shared use of

the word but different concepts of discourse. Interpellation, Althusser's idea based on Lacan,

specifically involves the moment and process of recognition of interaction with the ideology at

hand. Foucault eschews the notion of ideology and his quasi-structuralist analytics are quite

antithetical to Lacanian notions of Real, Symbolic, Imaginary.

The word Interpellation is also used to refer to the formal right of a parliament to submit formal

questions to the government. In many parliaments, each individual member of parliament has the

right to formally submit questions (possibly a limited amount during a certain period of time) to a

member of government. The respective minister or secretary is then required to respond and to justify

government policy. Interpellation thus allows the parliament to supervise the government's activity. In

this sense, it is closer to a motion of censure. In English, the parliamentary questioning sense of

'interpellation' dates from the late 19th century. It has been adopted from French constitutional

discourse.

The English word 'interpellation' is adopted from French, interpellation. The French word refers, in

constitutional discourse, to the above right of a parliament. In everyday and common legal usage,

however, it refers to 'holding (or detaining) for questioning' - by the police or a similar authority. This

would probably be the primary association for a French reader of Lacan or Althusser.