never mistook his cheery shout of greeting in the street is offered here as irrefutable evidence that the business of ideological interpellation is invariably successful. But is it? What if we fail to recognize and respond to the call of the Subject? What if we return the reply: 'Sorry, you've got the wrong person'? That we have to be interpellated as some kind of subject is clear: the alternative, for Lacan, would be to fall outside the symbolic order altogether into psychosis. But there is no reason why we should always accept society's identification of us as this particular sort of subject. Althusser simply runs together the necessity of some 'general' identification with out submission to specific social roles. There are, after all, many different ways in which we can be 'hailed', and some cheery cries, whoops and whistles may strike us as more appealing than some others. Someone may be a mother, Methodist, house-worker and trade unionist all at the same time, and there is no reason to assume that these various forms of insertion into ideology will be mutually harmonious. Althusser's model is a good deal too monistic, passing over the discrepant, contradictory ways in which subjects may be ideologically accosted -- partially, wholly, or hardly at all -- by discourses which themselves form no obvious cohesive unity.

As Peter Dews has argued, the cry with which the Subject greets us must always be interpreted; and there is no guarantee that we will do this in the 'proper' fashion. ⁴⁹ How can I know for sure what is being demanded of me, that it is I who am being hailed, whether the Subject has identified me aright? And since, for Lacan, I can never be fully present as a 'whole subject' in any of my responses, how can my accession to being interpellated be taken as 'authentic'? Moreover, if the response of the Other to me is bound up with my response to it, as Lacan would argue, then the situation becomes even more precarious. In seeking the recognition of the Other, I am led by this very desire to misrecognize it, grasping it in the imaginary mode; so the fact that there is desire at work here -- a fact which Althusser overlooks -- means that I can never quite grasp the Subject and its call as they really are, just as it can never quite know whether I have 'truly' responded to its invocation. In Lacan's own work, the Other just signifies this ultimately inscrutable nature of all individual subjects. No particular other can ever furnish me with the confirmation of my identity I seek, since my desire for such confirmation will always 'go beyond' this figure; and to write the other as Other is Lacan's way of signalling this truth.

The political bleakness of Althusser's theory is apparent in his very conception of how the subject emerges into being. The word 'subject' literally means 'that which lies beneath', in the sense of some ultimate foundation; and throughout the history of philosophy there have been a number of candidates for this function. It is only in the modern

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