ABSTRACT
Paradoxically, the explicit legal and political arguments that seek to tie such speech to certain contexts fail to note that even in their own discourse, such speech has become citational, breaking with the prior contexts of its utterance and acquiring new contexts for which it was not intended. The linguistic scene the authors have been considering is one in which there are subjects who stand in a relation of addressing and being addressed, where the capacity to address appears to be derived from having been addressed, where a certain subjectivation in language is constituted by this reversibility. The presumption of a dyadic relation, however, need not constrain the people understanding of interpellation. It seeks to introduce a reality rather than report on an existing one; it accomplishes this introduction through a citation of existing convention. lnterpellation is an act of speech whose “content” is neither true nor false: it does not have description as its primary task.
