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This essay starts from the theory of disputes and progresses towards a theory of 'interpellation', which it aims to outline. The starting point is given by Lyotard's differend, which provides a first contrast between dispute and quarrel. Dispute can be seen as the more irenic pole of a system where quarrel would be identified as clearly agonistic. The essay first revisits the differend in the light of Habermas's theory, which posits that discussions take place against the background of a lifeworld. This enables ways of conceptualizing both dispute, as emerging from the possibilities offered by language games, and quarrel, which belongs to the world of incomprehension. This first model is subjected to the test of Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland' books, where dissensus is transformed into consensus, where a quarrel may end up in a dispute which respects conventions. But the crucial point of the essay is to provide a philosophy of language which enables the conceptualization of quarrels. The essay revisits the conceptions put forward in The Violence of Language and A Marxist Philosophy of Language but then carries the analysis into new territory. Finding inspiration in Althusser's theory of interpellation and in Judith Butler's reading of Althusser, the essay shows that quarrels enact both interpellation and counter-interpellation, and views further quarrels as one of the characteristics of human language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spectrality has always been a threat to order, to the logic of difference and binary opposites - a threat therefore to the classic law of ontology, which deconstructionist thinkers and writers have consistently sought to subvert, prominently among them Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous. While also engaging in an implicit dialogue with Louis Althusser's theory of 'interpellation', Cixous and Derrida have reinvented the psychoanalysis of gender-production through their reading of each other. Spectrality is for them an injunction to preserve otherness and safeguard the presence/absence of what in fact does not yet exist, the almost unnameable which pushes at the boundaries of language and thought, and whose mystery writing aspires to attend to. Burials should not thus be performed according to established practice: they must be faulty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first section of the essay assesses the similitude and differences between the Althusserian concept of ideology and Barthes's concept of ‘ideosphere’, as developed in the seminar on the Neutral. The second section rehearses the different stages of Barthes's complex relation to Marxism and suggests that, in spite of the explicit rejection of the doctrine, there remains a Marxist substratum to Barthes's thought. The third section compares the two theories of ideology and shows that Barthes's insistence on the centrality of language allows him to offer a more comprehensive account of ideology: what begins in a form of allusion to Marxism ends up at a certain distance. The last section wonders what contribution Barthes's theory of ideosphere can make to a Marxist philosophy of language: one unexpected aspect of the answer makes use of the concept of style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]