Althusser's theory of ideology involves at least two crucial misreadings of the psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan -- not surprisingly, given the sibylline obscurantism of the latter. To begin with, Althusser's imaginary subject really corresponds to the Lacanian ego, which for psychoanalytic theory is merely the tip of the iceberg of the self. It is the ego, for Lacan, which is constituted in the imaginary as a unified entity; the subject 'as a whole' is the split, lacking, desiring effect of the unconscious, which for Lacan belongs to the 'symbolic' as well as the imaginary order. The upshot of this misreading, then, is to render Althusser's subject a good deal more stable and coherent than Lacan's, since the buttoned-down ego is standing in here for the dishevelled unconscious. For Lacan, the imaginary dimension of our being is punctured and traversed by insatiable desire, which suggests a subject rather more volatile and turbulent than Althusser's serenely centred entities. The political implications of this misreading are clear: to expel desire from the subject is to mute its potentially rebellious clamour, ignoring the ways in which it may attain its allotted place in the social order only ambiguously and precariously. Althusser, in effect, has produced an ideology of the ego, rather than one of the human subject; and a certain political pessimism is endemic in this misrepresentation. Corresponding to this ideological misperception of his on the side of the 'little' or individual subject is a tendentious interpretation of the 'big' Subject, the governing ideological signifiers with which the individual identifies. In Althusser's reading, this Subject would seem more or less equivalent to the Freudian superego, the censorious power which keeps us obediently in our places; in Lacan's work, however, this role is played by the 'Other', which means something like the whole field of language and the unconscious. Since this, in Lacan's view, is a notoriously elusive, treacherous terrain in which nothing quite stays in place, the relations between it and the individual subject are a good deal more fraught and fragile than Althusser's model would imply. ⁴⁷ Once again, the political implications of this misunderstanding are pessimistic: if the power which subjects us is singular and authoritarian, more like the Freudian superego than the shifting, self-divided Lacanian Other, the chances of opposing it effectively would seem remote.

If Althusser's subject were as split, desirous and unstable as Lacan's, then the process of interpellation might figure as a more chancy, contradictory affair than it actually does. 'Experience shows', Althusser writes with solemn banality, 'that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed.' ⁴⁸ The fact that Louis Althusser's friends apparently

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