The subject-form of discourse

pp. 110-129

in: Michel Pêcheux, Language, semantics and ideology, Berlin, Springer, 1982

Abstract

I can sum up what precedes by saying that behind the evident proposition that "Of course I am myself' (with my name, my family, my friends, my memories, my "ideas', my intentions and my obligations) there is the process of interpellation-identification that produces the subject in the place left empty: "he who …', i. e., X, the quidam who happens to be there; and that in various forms imposed by "legal-ideological social relations'.¹ The future perfect tense of juridical law, "he who will have done some damage to …' (and the law always finds someone to bite on, a "singularity' to which to apply its "universality') produces the subject in the form of the subject in law.² As for the ideological subject who duplicates the subject in law, he is interpellated-constituted in the evident character of the observation that carries and masks the identificatory "norm': "a French soldier does not retreat' signifies in fact "if you are a true French soldier, which is what you are, you cannot/must not retreat'.³ Through "habit' and "usage', therefore, it is ideology that designates both what is and what ought to be, sometimes with linguistically marked "deviations' between observation and norm which operate as a device for the "taking up of slack'.⁴ It is ideology that supplies the evidentness with which "everyone knows' what a soldier is,⁵ or a worker, a boss, a factory, a strike, etc., the evidentness that makes a word or an utterance "mean what it says' and thereby masks in the "transparency of language' what I shall call the material character of the meaning of words and utterances.