Collection Oramellon · Reference Note

Anthropology of Interpellation

A paradigm of the being who is called and who responds, developed by Christian Mahoukou.

Definition

The anthropology of interpellation designates a philosophical and theological paradigm according to which the human being is constituted not first of all as a self-enclosed substance, nor as a mere effect of social structures, but as a being who is called and who responds. On this view the person is not a given subject who subsequently enters into relation: the person comes to be in the very act of responding to a call that precedes it. Human being and becoming are thought from response, and from the resonance it awakens, rather than from any self-grounding.

Respondeo ergo sum Respondeo ergo fio I respond, therefore I am — I respond, therefore I become

The shift from sum ("I am") to fio ("I become") carries the essential point: identity is not an acquired foundation but an accomplishment always underway, sustained and renewed by each response. Responding is not a consequence of existing; it is the mode in which existence comes to be.

Situation and distinction

In philosophy the term interpellation is today associated above all with Louis Althusser, for whom ideology "hails" the individual — the policeman's "Hey, you there!" — and constitutes it as a subject by capturing it. There, interpellation is a capture: the subject is produced, heteronomously, by the apparatuses that precede it.

The anthropology of interpellation stands at the opposite pole. What constitutes the human being is not capture by an instance that subjects it, but the response by which it rises and becomes itself. Where the Althusserian subject undergoes the call, the interpellated being responds to it, and its freedom unfolds in that response. The paradigm is equally distinct from the Cartesian cogito, which grounds the subject on the reflexive thought of a solitary substance: being is no longer first and closed, but second and open, suspended upon a call.

It converses, by contrast, with the philosophies of relation and of the word — Martin Buber (the I–Thou), Emmanuel Levinas (the call of the other's face), Franz Rosenzweig, Jean-Luc Marion (the gifted, the call), Mikhail Bakhtin (dialogism) — as well as with the kerygmatic tradition of the word that addresses (Rudolf Bultmann, Gerhard Ebeling, Ernst Fuchs). Its own contribution lies in a third term, often absent from these traditions: resonance, whereby the response does not close back upon the subject but propagates and forms community.

The A2R triad: Call — Response — Resonance

The elementary structure of the paradigm is a triad, noted A2R (after the French Appel–Réponse–Résonance, "Call–Response–Resonance"), articulating three inseparable moments:

Call (Appel): The first term, always prior to the subject. The human being finds itself already called — by another, by the world, by God — before it could ever have chosen itself. In Greek, to call is καλεῖν (kalein, "to call") and calling or vocation κλῆσις (klēsis, "calling, vocation").
Response (Réponse): The act by which the interpellated being comes to be. Response is not mechanical reaction: it is the very locus of freedom and of the constitution of the self. The paradigm distinguishes several modes of response — among them acceptance, refusal, deferral — and counts among them attentional absence, a form of inattention that is already, in its way, a response.
Resonance (Résonance): The reverberation of the response beyond the one who responds. Understood not as an inner echo but as a collective fact, resonance is that by which one response calls forth others and weaves a community of the interpellated.

Operative concepts

The paradigm unfolds through a lexicon of its own, whose principal entries are as follows:

Mahoukou Law (Loi Mahoukou): The founding law of the paradigm: the human being is constitutively interpellated; it precedes itself as a being-called and reaches itself only in responding. Interpellation is not an accident of existence but its structural law.
The interpellated being (l'être-interpellé): The very name of the human in this framework: not an "I" first posited and then solicited, but a being whose identity lies wholly in being called and in responding.
Dialogal ecology (écologie dialogale): The relational milieu in which call and response circulate: a living fabric of reciprocal interpellations on which the health of the human depends. The wounding of this milieu is the object of an anthropology of sin as rupture of dialogue.
Interpellative atrophy (loi d'atrophie interpellative): The law describing the progressive weakening of the capacity to respond: for want of exercise, the aptitude to hear and to answer the call retracts. Atrophy is not a discrete fault but a wearing-away of the disposition to respond.
Topology of impediment (topologie de l'empêchement): A mapping of the figures and places that obstruct response: the ways in which the call is smothered, deferred, or prevented from reaching its end. It describes the space of blockages rather than drawing up a moral inventory of them.
Basso continuo (basse continue): A methodological principle borrowed from music. As the basso continuo sustains the variations of a work without ever coming to the fore, the A2R triad serves as a continuous ground beneath the developments of the corpus: it carries the discourse without dissolving into it.

The entries of this lexicon follow the usage established in the works of the Collection Oramellon and may be refined in the course of further publications.

Theological reach

The paradigm finds its theological extension in a rereading of Scripture under the sign of call and response. The flesh of the Word (John 1:14) is read as the call become body; the prayer of Christ (John 17) as the resonance of the Father in the Son; the "flesh" according to Saint Paul as the site of interpellation and of its possible atrophy. The performativity of the divine call is stated after the Pauline phrase καλεῖν τὰ μὴ ὄντα (kalein ta mē onta, "to call the things that are not"): the call that brings into being what it names. The figure of Mary, finally, is received as the interpellated being par excellence — the anthropology of response finding in her its accomplished face.

Anchors in the corpus

The paradigm is developed, under its various faces, throughout the Collection Oramellon. Among its landmarks:

The founding axioms — Respondeo ergo sum, Respondeo ergo fio, the Oramellon Manifesto.
The Ontology of the Call (Ontologie de l'Appel), which provides its metaphysical basis.
The tetralogy Anthropology of Interpellation (aesthetics, ethics, political philosophy, phenomenology of religious experience).
The Anthropology of Thresholds (Anthropologie des seuils) collection, which unfolds its passages.
The theological side — La Chair du Verbe, La Résonance de Dieu, La Chair selon saint Paul, together with the diptych of the interpellative anthropology of sin and Marie, l'être interpellé.

Further reference

The anthropology of interpellation is published, in French and English, within the Collection Oramellon. It stands, as noted, in critical dialogue with Althusser's interpellation, the dialogical philosophies (Buber, Levinas, Marion, Bakhtin) and the kerygmatic theology of the word (Bultmann, Ebeling, Fuchs), from which it is distinguished by the primacy it accords to response and by the introduction of resonance as a collective term.