Vintage, 1979. For a schematic overview of nineteenth-century American and European individualisms, see Steven Lukes, Individualism, New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Montag argues that Althusser’s thesis that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects “only takes on its full meaning in relation” to Foucault’s description ofthe material conditions ofinterpellation in Discipline and Punish, 163–70. Noting how Foucault “opens an entire dimension that Althusser’s essay unwittingly presupposes: a history ofthe body, the history ofthe individual itself,” Montag provides further support for the utility ofinverting Althusser, 167.
28 Already in Madness and Civilization (trans. Richard Howard, New York: Vintage, 1973), Foucault describes the great confinement of the seventeenth century.
29 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 142.
30 Ibid., 143.
31 Ibid., 170. Foucault notes that disciplinary power reverses the “axes of individuation.” Procedures of “ascending” individuation mark the individuated as possessing more power than others, as great and privileged. Hence, portraits are painted and tales are told of kings and nobles. Ascending individuation is not exactly an individuation. It is a glorification, a process for the generation of prestige and immortality so that the glorified is an exemplar of a group, whether that group be family, tribe, or nation.
32 Ibid., 201.
33 Ibid., 162.
34 In a nuanced discussion ofthe ways gender, race, and class become imbricated in a new notion ofindividual identity in eighteenth-century Europe, historian Dror Wahrman writes, “In the ancien régime of identity … the preference for generic categorization had meant that collective categories that identified groups had primacy over categories that identified individuals … But in the new configuration of the late eighteenth century such categories contributed to the generation ofunique identity before they generated the identicality ofa collective group, and were thus closer to the new understandings of self.” See his The Making of the Modern Self, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, 278.
35 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004, 115.
36 Ibid., 86.
37 Ibid., 151–52.
38 Molly Anne Rothenberg writes, “As purely external (and discursive) productions, subject positions have no interiority from which they might mount resistance to their own conditions of determination. Where Althusser conceives of subjects as mis-recognizing (and therefore in principle capable of recognizing) the truth about their relations to real conditions oftheir production, Foucault conceives ofsubjects as nothing more than the conditions of their production and so incapable of misrecognition or recognition.” See her The Excessive Subject, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010, 26. My goal is to demonstrate the sense in which this interiority is transindividual, a crowd at the heart ofthe person.
39 Mladen Dolar, “Freud and the Political,” Theory & Event 12: 3, 2009, 15–29.
40 See Bruno Bosteels’s critique of Žižek on this point in The Actuality of Communism, London: Verso, 2011.
41 James Martel, Textual Conspiracies, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011.
42 See Slavoj Žižek’s discussion of the Mobius strip in Organs without Bodies, New York: Routledge, 2003; see also Rothenberg’s explication of the logic of the empty set as the addition of a negation, 30–45.
43 Jodi Dean, “Politics without Politics,” Parallax 15: 3, 2009, 20–36.
44 Bruno Bosteels, “Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism,” Part 2, Pli 13, 2002, 172–208, 185.
45 I provide a more extensive elaboration on this concept of the sovereignty of the people in The Communist Horizon, London: Verso, 2012. I am indebted to Jason Jones for discussion on this point.
46 Etienne Balibar introduces the concept of the “dif erential forms of historical individuality” already in part 3 of Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, London: Verso, 2009, 282–84. Parts 1 and 2 are authored by Althusser.
47 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari raise a similar point regarding the crowded Freudian unconscious in their reading of the Wolf Man in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
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