The evidentness of the subject as unique, irreplaceable and identical with himself: the absurd and natural reply 'It's me!' to the question 'Who's there?' ¹⁵ echoes the remark; it is 'evident' that I am the only person who can say 'I' when speaking of myself; this evidentness conceals something, which escapes Russell and logical empiricism: the fact that the subject has always been 'an individual interpellated as a subject', which, to remain in the ambience of Althusser's example, might be illustrated by the absurd injunction children address to one another as a superb joke: 'Mister So-and-so, remind me of your name!', an injunction whose playful character masks its affinity with the police operation of assigning and checking identities. Because this is indeed what is involved: the 'evidentness' of identity conceals the fact that it is the result of an identification-interpellation of the subject, whose alien origin is nevertheless 'strangely familiar' to him. ¹⁶

[. . .]

Now, taking into account what I have just set out, it is possible to regard the effect of the preconstructed as the discursive modality of the discrepancy by which the individual is interpellated as subject . . . while still being 'always-already a subject ', stressing that this discrepancy (between the familiar strangeness of this outside located before, elsewhere and independently, and the identifiable, responsible subject, answerable for his actions) operates 'by contradiction', whether the latter be suffered in complete ignorance by the subject or, on the contrary, he grasps it in the forefront of his mind, as 'wit': many jokes, turns of phrase, etc., are in fact governed by the contradiction inherent in this discrepancy; they constitute, as it were, the symptoms of it, and are sustained by the circle connecting the contradiction suffered (i.e. 'stupidity') with the contradiction grasped and displayed (i.e. 'irony'), as the reader can confirm using whatever example he finds especially 'eloquent'. ¹⁷

The role of symptom I have discerned in the operation of a certain type of joke (in which what is ultimately involved is the identity of a subject, a thing or an event) with respect to the question of ideological interpellation-identification leads me to posit, in connection with this symptom, the existence of a process of the signifier, in interpellationidentification. Let me explain: it is not a matter here of evoking the 'role of language' in general or 'the power of words', leaving it uncertain whether what is invoked is the sign, which designates something for someone, as Lacan says, or the signifier, i.e. what represents the subject for another signifier ( Lacan again). It is clear that, for my purposes, it is the second hypothesis which is correct, because it treats of the subject as process (of representation) inside the non-subject constituted by the network of signifiers, in Lacan's seme: the subject is 'caught' in this network -- 'common nouns' and

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