Police Power: The Biopolitical State Apparatus and Differential Interpellations

Abstract

This essay revisits Althusser’s work on ideology and the state in light of the growing prominence of police power. It interrogates the figure of the cop in Althusser’s ISAs essay—and in the longer manuscript from which it was extracted—as a symptom of the instability of the ideology/violence binary that structures Althusser’s classification of state apparatuses, while tracing its implications for Althusser’s difficulty in accounting for the constitution of different subjects. Building on Foucault’s work on the police and putting Althusser and Foucault in conversation, the essay proposes an amendment to Althusser with the idea of the police as a Biopolitical State Apparatus that is responsible for the differential interpellation of subjects.