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Chapter 1

Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences

In so far as [politics] is a sequential subjectivity, any investigation in terms of continuity and gradual unfolding is precluded, and the relations previously proposed between history and politics, wherein it was maintained that it was through history – the bearer of a notion of continuity whether in movement or by means of a dialectic – that politics became intelligible, are now broken.

– Sylvain Lazarus, Anthropologie du nom, 1996 (my translation)

The return to a state logic is a consequence of the termination of a political sequence, not its cause. Defeat is not the essence of effectuation.

– Sylvain Lazarus, Anthropologie du nom, 1996 (my translation)

THINKING THE IMMANENT EXCEPTION

Africans were integrated into European ‘modernity’ through the slave trade. Yet rather than being its pathetic victims, they were able to think as human beings and to actualise that thought during particular exceptional events. It was not simply that people opposed oppression and that rebellions took place; it was also, and more importantly, that in some cases an excessive subjectivity of freedom came to dominate their thinking. The most important of these was without doubt what has become known as the Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804, which was an event of world significance. Its effects would have been even more far-reaching had not the modern European and North American states banded together to fight its radical humanist consequences by each and every means available to them. They continue to do so today. I begin from this event both because of its world significance and, more prosaically, in order to utilise it as a way of illustrating some of the more important theoretical categories and concepts to be encountered throughout this book. I need, however, to provide a brief introduction to some of these categories themselves which will be deployed in this first part of the book. Two fundamental conceptual issues inform my discussion of the history of the emancipatory struggles undertaken by Africans. The first concerns the idea of the exception, what I have already referred to as the subjective ‘excess’; the second refers to the problem of rationally explaining historical time. Both, in one way or another, stem from Hegel’s philosophy.

We should begin from the idea of the exception as thought by Badiou and Rancière. Rancière, as we have seen, refers to the exception as the central feature of people who speak, who move ‘out of place’.¹ In fact, this exception in politics is for him identifiable ex post facto in the form of a historical event which, in addition, is the manifestation or realisation of equality (Rancière, 1995, 2012). For Badiou, on the other hand, the exception is thought of as an event in itself – although historical, the event is potentially political. The event is what creates the possibility of excessive thought; it is purely internal to the situation, for it is always located in an ‘evental site’. An exceptional event can be recognised as it occurs. As Badiou notes, it is ‘the sudden creation of a myriad new possibilities ... none of which is a repetition of the already known’ (Badiou, 2011a, my translation). In order to be able to think this exception, however, a certain theoretical orientation towards the human capacity for understanding is necessary so that it can indeed be recognised as exceptional. In particular, Badiou insists that thinking the exception must begin with a principled distancing from empiricism and its belief that the ‘limits of knowledge’ are given by experience:

Today we have the triumph of empiricism ... The victory of empiricism is evidently the fact that any convincing argumentation is one which emphasises constraints. It is said that it is from these that one must begin. This is not the case for a principled activity; this does not mean that constraints must be ignored, but that the point of departure is the law that we propose concerning what we want, what we desire etc. ... The question of ‘changing the world’ is ... not fundamentally a question of analysing the world and of the alternative evaluation we may have of it. It is a question that essentially comes down to the opposition, between a form of thought that begins from principles and a perspective that begins from reality (Badiou, 2012c, my translation, emphasis in original).

This is a fundamental point. We must indeed insist that there are always exceptions and that it is always possible to shift the limits of knowledge. The core idea that enables the thought of exceptions is, according to Badiou (2013f), the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung (to overcome, to supersede, to exceed, to sublate). If human subjective capacity were seen as limited by experience, it would follow that there must be strict limits to human understanding. These limits are here ultimately provided, not by reason, but by the experience of what exists, to which reason is forced to comply. What this argument means is that one cannot limit thought to an empiricist position that describes and analyses the extant, without at the same time denying the possibility of exceptions to those descriptions and analyses – at least, exceptions which are immanent to the situation itself (rather than emanating from beyond its limits, from outside). What follows, according to Badiou, is that underlying all empiricist thought is a passivity that governs human subjectivity. He insists that ‘one must understand by empiricism the idea that everything must be founded on a primordial passivity amounting to cumulative external effects’ on subjectivity.² In fact, empiricism ‘necessarily leads to a theory of the practical and cognitive limits of human capacity (the fundamental theme of the “limits of reason”)’ (2013f, my translation). Both reason and subjectivity are thus, in this perspective, constrained by experience. Exceptions are not thinkable within empiricism other than as externalities themselves.

Empiricism is characterised by an essential connection regarding what is possible within the law of the world: it is the world itself that determines what is possible. On the other hand, from an emancipatory perspective, there is always a moment when one is obliged to say that a possibility results from an active confrontation between the state of the world on the one hand and principles on the other; a moment when one can declare to be possible something which the weight of the world declares to be impossible. If the expression ‘to change the world’ is to have any meaning at all, it must be that a real change resides on an impossible point, but one which becomes possible during circumstances which are always of an exceptional nature (Badiou, 2012c, my translation, emphasis in original).

One must note the strictly conservative limits of empiricism (conservative in the etymological sense) because one cannot possibly think change within a situation or social world if one begins from description and analysis, i.e. from the demarcation of the limits of people’s lives in society, the social structures and institutions that contain and determine them, the discourses and subjectivities in which they also are forced to think by power, and so on. These are precisely the kinds of accounts that dominate in Africa today, irrespective of whether they are political-economic, structuralist or post-structuralist, postcolonial, nationalist or neo-liberal in persuasion (see Mbembe, 2013). They are the stuff of knowledge in 21st-century Africa; I have qualified them as ‘the tyranny of the objective’, for they make it impossible to think political choices, as history and society determine all thinking (Neocosmos, 2012a: 468). Knowledge, however, must be firmly distinguished from thought, which is always excessive, beyond the ‘normal’ and the ‘habitual’, oriented towards what could be rather than simply to what exists (Lazarus, 2012). The point here, it must be emphasised, is to make an argument not for ignoring empirical evidence, but rather for not seeing it as the ultimate limit of thought; empirical evidence must be used fundamentally as a necessary reference point for reason.³ One must therefore start with an affirmation that can be rationally maintained. The rational affirmation maintained here, as I have already stated, is that people think. For Rancière – as indeed for Fanon, as we shall see – not only do people think, but they change themselves through thinking:

The great emancipatory movements have been movements in the present, ones of increased competencies, perhaps as much as and even more than movements destined to prepare another future ... These are people who become capable of things they were previously incapable of, who accomplish a break through the wall of the possible ... people do not come together in order to realise a future equality; a certain kind of equality is realised by the act of coming together (Rancière, 2012: 207, my translation).

It is this process that is referred to as ‘subjectivation’, the creation of a political subject. Given that such a process is one of exceeding identity, Rancière refers to it as a rational ‘dis-identification’: ‘Any subjectivation is a dis-identification, a tearing-away from the naturalness of place, the opening of a subject space where anyone can be counted’ (Rancière, 1995: 60, my translation). Because of ‘dis-identification’ there is always a universal aspect to emancipatory politics. Moreover, an excessive subjectivity is always connected in some way or other with a politics expressive of social place (the idea and practice of equality only exist in relation to forms of inequality), simply because excess always exceeds something and is always ‘internal’ to the situation, as Badiou (2010b: 146–7) puts it. The level of excess, of distance from the expressive (from identity) – what might be called the ‘excessive gap’ – varies in each case of subjectivation and is irretrievably marked by it, even if only in a negative way.⁴ The existence of excessive thought, which always includes some universal notion of human equality, along with the political principles it enunciates, defines a specific historical sequence, which, as we shall see, is not to be understood as part of a continuous unfolding over time. At the same time, it is the dialectical relation between the excessive and the expressive that regulates the ability of the excessive to sustain itself and what Lazarus (1996) calls its eventual ‘saturation’. The idea of freedom as understood by Africans within different emancipatory sequences illuminates this dialectic and in a sense helps us to understand the limits of the sequence in question.

For example, the manner in which the slaves in Haiti understood freedom in 1791 differs from how they understood it after 1796 and how the ex-slaves began to think it after 1804. In the first instance it referred to legal emancipation, in the second to national state independence. The first notion was limited by the expressive constraints of a legal conception; the second by a statist one. Similar points can be made with regard to the manner in which freedom was thought during the independence struggles in the 1950s and 1960s and also, in the South African case, in the 1980s. The expressive–excessive dialectic enables us to understand both the character of that subjectivity and its limitations; it therefore enables us to identify the limits of the historical sequence’s unfolding.

THE IDEA, POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY AND THE PROBLEM OF OBJECTIVE HISTORICAL TIME

The second issue in any attempt to understand emancipatory political subjectivities concerns a discussion of historical analysis, for it is the discipline of history that is said to account for politics over time and thus to make it intelligible. This question concerns the problems inherent in any attempt to isolate different political sequences – particularly emancipatory sequences – in Africa that illustrate the making by Africans of their history as well as their contribution to world history as a whole. At the same time, it is also an attempt to think of possible new forms of periodisation that stress discontinuous sequential subjective singularities as opposed to the objective periodisations that usually highlight structural changes, such as forms of economy and capitalism or forms of state. These have included, for example, the divisions between merchant capitalism (16th–18th centuries), industrial capitalism (19th century), imperial or monopoly capitalism (end of 19th century to mid-20th century) and globalisation (1973 to the present). They have also included periodisation in terms of the distinctions between ‘traditional–modern–postmodern’ and particularly those between ‘precolonial–colonial–postcolonial’, which is the most common and seemingly the most obvious. Such periodisations stress both continuity and fundamentally objective changes; they are historicist and, as a result, force thought into specific parameters, thereby excluding different modes of thought.

It can be noted, for example, that the standard procedure of demarcating African history along the precolonial–colonial–postcolonial temporal dimension has two major consequences. Firstly, it focuses on changes in state forms and privileges European domination as the norm around which history is plotted and thought; secondly, it has had the consequence of occluding what is arguably the most important event in modern African history – the slave trade – for it cannot be contained within this view of historical change. In particular, the slave trade does not feature within histories of international migration, even though it can be seen as the first instance of ‘forced migration’ on a massive scale. Historians and economists of migration regularly fall into this obvious error, only partly because they, together with demographers, tend to understand the migratory process as a voluntary one; in fact, slavery is not thought fundamentally as a political process. For example, Adepoju (1995) uses this threefold periodisation in his discussion of the history of migration on the continent. The Atlantic slave trade simply disappears from his vision altogether. It is not seen as precolonial, as this concerns distinct African societies untrammelled by Western domination. It is not a feature of colonialism, as this concerns the political dominance of Africa by the Western powers and the construction of colonial states, beginning in the late 19th century, when the slave trade had legally ended. The result is that it simply disappears from the horizon of his inquiry altogether.

Moreover, if it is the case that African peoples were controlled, exploited and oppressed by foreign powers before the colonial period proper, which was undeniably the case, then it follows that the ‘state-colonial’ period (i.e. from the 1890s to the 1960s) is not the only time period when such foreign oppression, and hence national reaction, can be seen to have taken place. A ‘precolonial’ colonial form of domination (so to speak) also suggests a postcolonial one. It suggests that it is possible to conceive of colonialism beyond the narrow period of formal state-colonial domination; in other words, as not exclusively defined by a particular state form.⁵ It implies the possibility at least of various contemporary neo-colonial forms of colonial domination right into the current period of globalisation.⁶ The defining feature of colonialism is thus not the existence of a colonial state as such, but a set of oppressive politics enabling foreign domination, with the consequence, as I shall show in Part 2, that the people are considered by the state as its enemy.

Apart from the necessity to reject its crude linearity (the teleological unfolding of an essence), to follow such a strategy of structural periodisation is to understand African history simply in terms of continuities and changes in the world economy or world configurations determined in the West, at the level of empire. Africa is consequently thought of as a victim of (or, at best, as simply reacting to) events taking place elsewhere, so that African agency disappears from thought. In this context it should be noted that historicism does not simply consist of the simple idea of linear development. Rather, linear development presupposes historical determinism, the idea that the past determines the present. A notion of causality, of necessity, is therefore at the core of historicism, as well as the view that history is reducible to time, so that, as Marx put it, ‘the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’ (Marx, 1852a: 96).

My aim in this book is rather to attempt to think history in a way that foregrounds the political subjectivity of African people and thereby makes it thinkable. It is an attempt at periodisation in terms of limits to thought and their overcoming. For this to be possible, the core of the organising principle of periodisation must be distinct sequences (of state or excessive subjectivities) along with the socially located experiences or singularities that gave birth to them. Emancipatory politics in particular can only be understood as a sequence limited in time or, as Badiou puts it, only as a ‘singular trace where the truth of a collective situation sees the light of day. But there exists no principle of linkage between this trace and those which had preceded it’ (Badiou, 1992: 234, my translation). In other words, because it is concerned with imposing regularity on time (past, present and also future), history sees time as continuous and thereby conflates the subjective with the objective, with the result that it effaces the exceptional and the irregular. History is concerned with establishing a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ and with affirming that the relation between the two is an objective one, understandable through the deployment of scientific protocols. It amounts in fact to a state mode of thinking, for this mode always ‘objectifies’ subjectivity; thus, in Lazarus’s formulation, ‘history is a thought-relation-of-the-state’ (1996: 17). On the other hand, different emancipatory modes of politics understood as singular subjectivities are only thinkable as discontinuous sequences. As Badiou puts it, if, as is usually the case, we consider history as continuous, ‘there is a history of states but there is no history of politics’ (1992: 234, my translation). In brief, what are usually said to be historical periods are continuous structural and expressive subjective historical sequences of state or imperial politics (the politics of power), whereas emancipatory politics are always discontinuous, singular and purely subjective affirmations that can only be understood in terms of themselves. Shifting from understanding historical continuities to understanding discontinuities is not an easy endeavour. In fact, Foucault (2003a: 55) warns us that ‘establishing discontinuities is not an easy task for history in general. And it is certainly even less so for the history of thought’⁷. What, then, are the difficulties?

The fundamental theoretical problem here concerns that posed by Hegel, who understood history in terms of subjectivity but for whom this process amounted to the unfolding of the ethical ‘Idea’ – hence his adherence to an essence or subject of history (realised in his case in the state⁸). A different philosophy of the Idea is necessary and it should be apparent that an Idea only exists, is only actualised, through the actions of people who affirm it; we shall see in a later chapter that this is precisely how Frantz Fanon understands the nation, for example. Badiou argues that the Idea must be understood as ‘the affirmation that a new truth is historically possible’ (2009d: 201), while simultaneously insisting on ‘the primacy of the Idea as practice’ (2013f, 14 November 2012, p. 9, my translation). A discontinuous history of politics, therefore, must be understood in terms of changing subjectivities in order to avoid collapsing into historicism, whether of the ‘materialist’ or ‘idealist’ variety. I assess below how Lazarus tries to overcome this problem through his work on time and especially his assessment of Marc Bloch. His solution to the problem posed by Hegel is to understand the historical thought of politics as not always in existence,⁹ as discontinuous rather than continuous, as sequential and rare, and as composed of subjective political sequences. This follows, of course, from understanding emancipatory politics as excessive to what is considered to be normal or habitual, what is referred to by sociologists as ‘culture’. In particular, Lazarus identifies historical ‘modes of politics’ that are sequential, but all sequences do not necessarily point to the existence of distinct modes.

While changes in objective conditions (of accumulation, for example) have produced important effects on political subjectivities, particularly as they have always been the object of state thought, these subjectivities were also influenced, arguably at times even more fundamentally, by changes in modes of thought and politics expressed in popular struggles of various kinds. Particularly important here are the effects of political ‘events’, in Badiou’s sense of the term, during which emancipatory politics of affirmation are able to see the light of day for shorter or longer periods. Badiou (2009a) outlines three distinct novel evental subjectivities which emanate from any event: fidelity, reaction and obscurity. These three subjective dispositions can also be used to understand the limits of sequences and will be referred to here in order to delineate some of the major sequences in African history that are clearly defined by emancipatory events. More minor sequences, not necessarily continental in their consequences, will only be noted in passing.

That emancipatory politics are always sequential and rare (Lazarus, 1996) does not necessarily diminish their impact, the extent of which ultimately depends on asserting and maintaining a fidelity to events; it is such a fidelity, enabling what Badiou calls a maximal consequence, which creates a strong singularity or event (Badiou, 2008). In the context of African struggles for freedom, at least three different forms of historical event can be elucidated that unfolded as pure thought over limited periods: humanistic struggles such as the Saint-Domingue/Haiti Revolution in the 18th century; national liberation struggles in the 1950s–1960s, and ‘people’s struggles’ from the 1980s to the present.¹⁰ Fidelity to such events was usually overcome as subjectivities became saturated and gradually fell back in each case into new state political subjectivities, as they were transformed from pure thought and pure affirmation into social categories: the first into kingdoms, the second into nation-states, and the third into civil society. In this way, the purely subjective eventually became ‘objectified’ or ‘socialised’.

Such objectification amounts to a collapse into state subjectivities and ultimately has meant the reassertion of a reactive (and obscure) subjectivity occasioned by the inability to maintain an affirmation of purely subjective politics.¹¹ This process is what is usually referred to as ‘depoliticisation’. Thus, state politics reassert themselves because of the gradual linking of politics to social categories, usually in an ‘expressive’ relation, as emancipatory thought gradually fades away; this is what Lazarus (1996) refers to as a process of ‘saturation’. This insight is particularly useful and can be investigated through an analysis of the three main emancipatory political sequences in modern African history considered in this, the first part of this book. My main concern, therefore, is fundamentally a methodological one.

It is mainly because of the importance of thinking about politics as excessive subjectivities beyond the realm of state subjectivity, of detaching politics from the state, that Badiou’s philosophy of subjective militancy is of interest to Africa. On the African continent our manner of thinking politics has, since independence, been overwhelmingly dominated by different forms of liberalism, for all of which the state is the sole legitimate focus of politics.¹² This liberal conception has revolved around the idea that all politics concerns conflicts of interest and that the state manages such conflicts in the interest of all or of a class that rules. ‘Political society’ – organised interests at the level of the state itself – is the sole legitimate arena in which the conflict of interests can play itself out. That such organised interests are also said to operate within ‘civil society’ does not alter this perspective. For liberalism, ‘political society’ simply is the state.¹³ This idea has permeated so far into African political thinking that it has become difficult to conceive of an opposition political practice that is not reduced to capturing state posts or the state itself. In South Africa in particular, state fetishism is so pervasive within the hegemonic political discourse that debate is structured by the apparently self-evident ‘common-sense’ notion that the post-apartheid state can ‘deliver’ everything from jobs to empowerment, from development to human rights, from peace in Africa to a cure for HIV/AIDS. As a result, not only is the state deified, but social debate is foreclosed ab initio; the idea simply becomes one of assessing policy or capacity; in other words, the focus is on management, not on politics. Badiou enables us to begin to think a way around this problem by showing that the state is always what prescribes subjectively, within a given situation, what is possible and impossible in that situation.¹⁴ He notes: ‘The state organises and maintains, often by force, the distinction between what is possible and what is not’ (Badiou, 2009d: 192, my translation). It follows, then, that an event is something that occurs which, despite being always localised, is subtracted from the power of the state, something which overturns given ‘facts’ and which thereby enables the rise of a number of possibilities and a possible universal subjectivity or ‘truth’ valid across ‘worlds’. Given that the state is what organises and manages differences, emancipatory politics must then transcend differences.

For Badiou, therefore, emancipatory politics are ‘indifferent’ to identities, to difference.¹⁵ The ‘indifference to differences’ simply means that an emancipatory politics is universal and not linked to or ‘representative’ of any specific interest; it is ‘for all’, never ‘for some’. It follows that emancipatory politics do not ‘represent’ anyone:

Politics begins when one decides not to represent victims ... but to be faithful to those events during which victims politically assert themselves ... Politics in no way represents the proletariat, class or nation ... it is not a question of whether something which exists may be represented. Rather, it concerns that through which something comes to exist which nothing represents, and which purely and simply presents its own existence (Badiou, 1985: 75, 87).

An emancipatory politics, therefore, cannot be deduced from a social category (class, nation, state, history, economics, culture or tradition); it can only be understood in terms of itself, for it exceeds the thought of the social. Moreover, the state itself is ‘indifferent’ to truths and thus also to (emancipatory) politics; the democratic state in particular is merely concerned with knowledges and opinions, which it organises into a consensus.

Historically speaking, there have been some political orientations that have had or will have a connection with a truth, a truth of the collective as such. They are rare attempts and they are often brief ... These political sequences are singularities: they do not trace a destiny, nor do they construct a monumental history ... from the people they engage, these orientations require nothing but their strict generic humanity (Badiou, 2003: 70, emphasis in original).

Emancipatory politics, therefore, may or may not exist at any time and must be understood as pertaining exclusively to the realm of thought, for it is only thought that can effect fundamental change: ‘any politics of emancipation, or any politics which imposes an egalitarian maxim, is a thought in act’ (p. 71).

Where does all this leave the conceptualisation of contemporary politics on the African continent? The answer provided by Wamba-dia-Wamba is that one must identify modes of politics historically present in Africa, and also, and more importantly, specify the basic characteristics of possible emancipatory modes of politics on the continent today (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994). The latter project is, in his writings, highly informed by the analysis of Lazarus.

Politics (political capacity, political consciousness), the active prescriptive relationship to reality, exists under the condition of people who believe that politics must exist ... Generally in Africa, the tendency has been to assign it [this political capacity] to the state (including the party and liberation movements functioning really as state structures) per se. Unfortunately, the state cannot transform or redress itself: it kills this prescriptive relationship to reality by imposing consensual unanimity ... the thrust of progressive politics is to be separated from the state. It is not possible to achieve a democratic state, i.e. a state that is transparent to, rather than destructive of, people’s viewpoints, if people only ‘think’ state, internalize state and thus self-censor themselves (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994: 258).

In postcolonial Africa, therefore, one form or another of state fetishism has been the dominant way of conceiving the political capacity to transform reality. Nonetheless, I do attempt in this book to specify some of the features of a ‘National Liberation Struggle’ mode, which could at times enable a politics that was not exclusively state-focused and that can be said to have existed prior to independence to various extents. However, if the problem in Africa has been state thinking, then a new way of conceiving politics must be developed ‘at a distance’ from the state. Wamba-dia-Wamba has suggested that while it is the popular masses that enable ‘events’, the masses often possess a blind faith in the state or in those individuals whom they associate with change. It is the breaking of this blind faith that constitutes the political possibility of fidelity to the event, and it is those activists that militate for such a break who today engage in emancipatory politics on the African continent.¹⁶

HISTORICAL SUBJECTIVE MODES OF POLITICS

According to Lazarus (1996: 121ff), the Ancient Greeks invented politics, not just democracy; the two were in fact the same thing. This, he argues, was the condition for the invention of history as a reflection on social life – i.e. what we would today call social thought. His argument is founded on a study of the work of Moses Finley, one of the foremost authorities on Greek antiquity.¹⁷ For Finley, we can speak of the ‘invention’ of history by the Greeks,¹⁸ an invention that cannot be grasped as a passage from a mythical conception of the past to a rational conception of the past. The supposed break or rupture from mythical conceptions and turn to rational ones, which forms the basis of the positivist account, is unsustainable, for the rise of history does not supplant mythology but operates in parallel with it. Even in Herodotus (regarded as one of the first scientific historians), references to myths continue. Lazarus reads Finley as suggesting that history is a capacity, and a provisional capacity at that; a capacity that Lazarus names ‘sequential’, for it corresponds to a provisional subjective capacity which delimits a specific historical sequence. For Finley, history is not an invariant; any society or period does not necessarily have a history. There are societies which do not produce history, and not just those without states and without writing. The absence of history is not indicative of an absence of historical sources. Rather, in order for history to exist there should be a generation which has thought its own situation, its own conditions of life. The history (in this self-reflexive sense) of this generation is possible both for itself and also for future historians. There is therefore not always a capacity for history; this refers to a specific mode of thought contemporaneous with itself.

Two theses follow, according to Lazarus. Firstly, there can only be history which is contemporaneous with itself, and a specific consciousness is necessary for it to exist; secondly, the existence of a contemporaneous history is not always given. Not all generations possess this capacity or consciousness. Thus, history exists only under the condition of such a consciousness: only under such conditions can statements, formulations and generalisations be constructed with regard to the particular situation. For Finley, the condition of this capacity of an epoch to produce a history is nothing other than the existence of politics. The invention of history for Finley is contemporaneous with the invention of the ‘polis’, and particularly with the invention of politics. History is not connected to the state as such, but to the existence of politike techne, to political agency and excessive thought. It is not possible to explain the discovery of history by the Greeks as a matter of moving from an irrational mode of thinking to a rational one, but only as one of ‘invention’. For Lazarus, politics is also an invention, irreducible to the state, to classes, to the management of the social, to power. A specific subjective invention, politics is not permanent; it is, in Lazarus’s terms, ‘sequential and rare’. History and, by inference, social sciences do not always exist as independent novel thought distinguished from myth.¹⁹ They require politics for their existence, politics as a thought of something different from what exists. Excessive politics is always inventive and, through its inventiveness, impacts on thought and transforms it after the owl of Minerva has flown, to paraphrase Hegel’s famous aphorism. We need therefore to say something about politics in this transformative sense, for there is a sense in which politics precedes social thought.

In his discussion of Lazarus’s book Anthropologie du nom, Badiou (2005a: ch. 2) notes that there are in fact two distinct ways of dealing with Hegel’s idealist historicism of the actualisation of an absolute Idea. Either one follows Marx and the historian Marc Bloch in arguing that, however much people may be the makers of history, their ideas are reflections of the material world, in which case one replaces an idealist historicism by a materialist historicism; or one attempts to save the irreducibility of the Idea by considering it as a subjective singularity, not as a universal essence. The latter approach means abandoning notions of totality to which politics has to conform as well as the idea of time, and insisting rather on accounting for consciousness, ideologies, choices, practices – i.e. politics – as sequential subjective singularities. It is the latter path that is theorised at length by Lazarus (1996, 2013). This path is imposed on us as soon as we wish to maintain consistently that there is no telos, no end to history.

History is clearly a narrative construction ‘after the fact’; there is no ‘real’ of history as such – it is purely imaginary (Badiou, 2009d: 188, 190). To put it simply, history is understood scientifically ex post facto; politics, on the other hand, is simply lived.²⁰ For Marx, of course, the view that all history is the history of class struggles could only be derived ex post facto. In other words, it is only after politics has taken place that it becomes possible to say that it is history; historians can then argue about whether and how it was determined all along by structural developments including class struggles (or demography, climate, geography, economic interests, discourses or whatever). As it is about to take place or while it is taking place, politics is simply a number of (clearly constrained) collective decisions or choices (including choices about how to overcome or circumvent constraints) emanating from within specific subjectivities, while it attempts to make a seeming impossibility possible in emancipatory conditions; in other words, it is purely thought, purely subjective and irreducible. Class for Marx was both an objective category of political economy and history, on the one hand, and a category of politics, on the other. The distinction was not theorised by Marx, as for him there was an unfolding of history which drove necessarily towards a classless future after a transition period that he refers to as ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Marx, 1852b). Marx sees a communist political consciousness developing among workers as a result of their common experience of oppression and collective discipline in the labour process. It is this common social experience which he sees as giving rise to a working-class politics. For Marx, it is relations of production which form the basis of a political consciousness. In other words, he sees politics as emanating from workers’ experiences at work, an emanation that is ‘spontaneous’ in Lenin’s sense. This is why he sees organisation in trade unions as a step towards class organisation, i.e. towards communist consciousness. Hence unions, he says, ought not to restrict themselves to demanding wage increases but should be ‘using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class’ (Marx, 1865b: 226). Influenced by the great working-class movements of the 19th century, Marx clearly saw the mere fact of worker combination as a political act. This was not the case for Lenin, for whom only a party could enable a proletarian political consciousness and make it possible.

Class struggle as it takes place in the present, as Lenin knew full well, could not be about social structures; consequently, politics (e.g. insurrection) was for him a complex art and not a science. Class was, for Lenin, both a socio-economic category and a political category, but it is crucially important to note that, for him, a ‘proletarian politics’ could not be deduced from the objective socio-economic location of the working class. A proletarian politics was, for Lenin, ‘under condition’, to use Lazarus’s (1996) expression. The condition for such a politics was an organisation – for Lenin, the party – which had to develop positions on all important political issues of the day, something a mere ‘trade union consciousness’ could not possibly achieve. In this manner a political class of proletarians could demarcate itself in the political sphere through the medium of a party and a specific proletarian politics could be constructed. As is well known, for Lenin this politics could not be a spontaneous occurrence, as it had been for Marx, but could only result from the conscious application of theory to the political questions of the day (e.g. in Lenin’s time, the ‘agrarian question’, the ‘national question’, the ‘women’s question’, the question of the state).²¹ Lenin was the first to argue in the 20th century that a consciousness or ‘interest politics’ founded on a category of the social division of labour (in his case, workers’ and trade union consciousness) was not in itself emancipatory; something else was required to transform it into a universal and make it truly political.

Lazarus argues in some detail that the idea of historical time – which, along with the idea of totality, constitutes the foundation of historicism – must be abandoned, as it co-represents the objective and the subjective, the material and the mental (e.g. in the notion of the ‘conjuncture’), and thus enables historians to assert at the same time that change is objective and also that people make history. This is the position developed at length by Marc Bloch, whose book The Historian’s Craft makes a rigorous argument in this regard. For Bloch, time is the ‘element’ of history, ‘it is the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible’ (Bloch, 1954: 27–8). Lazarus notes that time is a ‘circulating category’ in Bloch’s work; in other words, it enables him to move without contradiction from the objective to the subjective, ‘men in time from the material perspective and from the subjective perspective’ (Lazarus, 1996: 158, my translation), as time is objective, after all, but it is men who ‘make history’. Bloch’s is a complex attempt to analyse subjectivities in history while rejecting Durkheimian positivist conceptions of science, but there is no need to outline it in detail here.²² For Lazarus, the answer to the problem posed by Hegel’s thought is not to follow Bloch or Marx, but rather to be inspired by Foucault’s notion of the episteme²³ as a discontinuous subjective historical segment and to theorise politics as singularities; in doing so, political subjectivities must be thought of internally as coherent sequences without reference to invariants external to them. While the discipline of history thinks in terms of ‘structural ensembles and conjunctures’, politics is concerned with ‘singularities’ (Lazarus, 1989: 22).

When outlining this point, Lazarus develops his views in detailed analyses of the politics of Marx (Lazarus, 1996), Lenin (Lazarus, 1989, 1996, 2007), Mao Zedong (Lazarus, 1996, Anon., 2005) and Saint-Just (Lazarus, 1995, 1996). Perhaps the way to actually make this argument apparent is by clarifying his distinction between Marx’s and Lenin’s political subjectivities; in this way, the logic behind the argument for the thinking of political singularities should become apparent.

Marx’s thesis may be outlined as follows: there is a structure of the real; societies do not constitute an arbitrary, chaotic, unformed and random whole and thus are not foreign to being thought. Societies are structurally organised. This structure is that of the class struggle. In order to make sense of the class struggle and of the structure of societies, Marx summons history in the sense that the class struggle is viewed as both objective and political (Lazarus, 1996: 54, my translation).

Lazarus argues that, for Marx, scientific notions are simultaneously the notions of political consciousness, simply because they can be realised; emancipation is therefore not a utopian ideal but a definite possibility.

The unique characteristic of Marx’s thought is that the prescriptive and the descriptive, in other words politics and science, are fused ... The name of this fusion is the idea of a ‘consciousness of history’; the communist proletarian is he who has a scientific and prescriptive vision of history – prescriptive because scientific. This fusion operates by itself in a spontaneous fashion because it is necessary (1996: 55, my translation).

As a result, communist proletarians are a ‘spontaneous’ product from within the ranks of the proletariat, so that ‘where there are proletarians, there are communists’; the appearance of communists is thus thought of as an internal process to the existence of a working class (Lazarus, 2007: 259). The core idea of politics here, as it was throughout the 19th century, is that of ‘insurrection’; it is this conception of politics which encounters its limits (becomes ‘saturated’, in Lazarus’s language) in the failure of the Paris Commune of 1871. The main lessons which Marx and Engels drew from this failure were rather ambiguous about the nature of the state, stressing the need to smash it, on the one hand, while affirming the need for proletarian state organisation, on the other (Badiou, 2006a: 257–90). The main lesson that Lenin, in particular, was to draw from this episode was the necessity for the working class to be organised in the form of a party: this was, of course, the period when modern parties were developing throughout Europe. From this time on, the class character of political parties was to be found not so much in the social origins of their membership but in their ideological positions – their subjectivities – as they recruited their membership from throughout the population and did not restrict it to a single social group (Badiou, 2006a; Lazarus, 2007: 256).

For Lazarus, Lenin breaks most clearly with Marx’s position in 1902 with his foundational text What Is to Be Done?, in which he distances himself from what he calls the politics of ‘spontaneity’. This text is foundational for Lazarus because it inaugurates the theory of modern emancipatory politics, for which the core idea will no longer be working-class insurrection but will be and remain ‘the party’ throughout the whole of the 20th century. This text is also inaugural in the precise sense that it founds a new political singularity, which Lazarus terms the Bolshevik mode of politics; this he sees as lasting from 1902 up to 1917. Lenin’s political conception is thus quite distinct from that of Marx, which Lazarus refers to as founding the classist mode. For Lenin, the appearance of social-democratic, proletarian or revolutionary consciousness is not a spontaneous phenomenon at all and requires a total break from such a view. The core of this subjectivity is ‘antagonism to the entire existing social and political order’, while the condition of existence of such a consciousness is the emergence of a social-democratic party (Lazarus, 2007: 259). This sequence was closed in October 1917, because from that time on the name ‘party’ ‘would be assigned to power, to the state’, i.e. to a totally different subjectivity. As for the Stalinist mode of politics, political thought was again different in that mode because, rather than being the condition for politics, the party now became the real subject of all knowledge and decision. Lazarus (1989) argues that Lenin’s texts between the two revolutions of February and October 1917 show a disjunction between his analyses of history (imperialism, war, etc.) and politics: the former can be clearly analysed and its course predicted – it is ‘clear’, in Lazarus’s term – while the latter was ‘obscure’, as the ‘future character of the revolution that had begun was undecidable’ (2007: 260). It follows for Lazarus that, for Lenin, ‘politics is charged with assuming its own thought, internal to itself. This is the condition of its existence’ (p. 260).²⁴

This brief outline is sufficient to make the central point that political sequences can indeed be understood in their own terms without deriving them from social categories. Lazarus does this by outlining several ‘modes of politics’. These are all singularities and are sequential and limited in the sense that they rise and then pass on as the strength of the subjectivity gradually peters out or is saturated. To refer more and more to the social as the external foundation of the subjective is to gradually end the affirmation of politics by diluting the purely subjective within state thought, with the result that the mode or sequence perishes through a process of saturation. As the politics of the sequence become saturated – they gradually become unable to think the new problems posed to them independently of state thinking – the subjective excess diminishes and vanishes until its eventual possible renewal or ‘resurrection’, in Badiou’s (2006c) sense. This saturation denotes the end of the sequence; political subjectivity morphs into a state politics for which the social is always foundational; the distance between politics and state is gradually reduced and vanishes (Badiou, 2006b: 5). It is this process that is often referred to as ‘depoliticisation’.²⁵

Central to this state politics, as I have already noted, is a conception in which politics is no longer understood in terms of itself; it is no longer an affirmation of pure subjectivity – a self-presentation – but is reduced to social categories. For Lazarus, this saturation is facilitated by the use of circulating categories, such as ‘class’, ‘people’, ‘nation’, which pertain to both the real of the purely politically subjective and to the domain of the sciences of the social. To put the same point in a slightly different way, excessive politics reach their limit when they lose their capacity to sustain their political subjectivity and revert to state expressive politics. It seems to me, however, that those historical modes of politics which Lazarus qualifies as constituted ‘in interiority’ – i.e. which think politics exclusively internally – cannot be understood as ‘pure’ subjectivities constituted totally independently of the state and of ‘external referents’, as he maintains. The political formulations of Marx, Lenin and Mao all contain references to a politics of representation of class interests, as I will show in some detail in a later chapter, and therefore do possess a certain degree of expressive content. The excessive character of the subjective modes which they outline is also combined, in various ways and to various extents, with a subjectivity expressive of the social. In a sense it is this complex dialectical feature of emancipatory politics, whereby excessive and expressive forms of politics are combined, that accounts for the fact of its eventual saturation when the mode is no longer able to sustain itself.

For Lazarus, modes of politics are thus identifiable by their limits; they are always sequential – they rise and then fade away. They are also located in specific sites (lieux). These sites are not necessarily physical places but can be any location where thought takes place. The disappearance of one of these sites entails the disappearance of such modes of politics. The sites of the Bolshevik mode were the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party and the soviets; with the disappearance of one of these sites – e.g. the soviets – the political mode and sequence came to an end.²⁶ In addition to the two modes of politics already mentioned, Lazarus outlines at some length four others: the Revolutionary mode, the Dialectical mode, the Stalinist mode and the Parliamentary mode. The Revolutionary mode is associated with the experience of the French Revolution between the summer of 1792 and July 1794. Its main site was the Jacobin Convention and its main militants and theoreticians were Saint-Just and Robespierre, the co-authors of the 1793 constitution. Its conception of politics was one that proclaimed that ‘a people has only one dangerous enemy: its government’ (Saint-Just, 2004: 630, my translation) and that understood politics as a form of moral consciousness or ‘virtue’ to be combined with ‘terror’ against the revolution’s enemies (Robespierre, 2007). For Saint-Just (2004: 758, my translation), ‘it is leaders who must be disciplined because all evil results from the abuse of power’. Thus, ‘Saint-Just regularly proposes analyses and policies which, although they concern the state and the government, are thought outside of and are explicitly directed against a statist logic’ (Lazarus, 1996: 225ff, my translation).

The main theoretician of the Dialectical mode is Mao Zedong. According to him, history is subordinated to the masses, as its influence disappears behind subjective notions such as an ‘enthusiasm for socialism’. ‘For Mao, the masses do not make history, they are history’ (Lazarus, 2013: 131, my translation). Political consciousness develops in leaps and bounds and ‘there exists an exclusively political knowledge because such knowledge is dialectical without being historical. Even if the party exists it does not identify the mode of politics.’ The sites of this mode are those of the revolutionary war: the party, the army, the United Front; its limits extend from 1928 to 1958 (Lazarus, 1996: 91, my translation; see also Anon., 2005).

These modes of politics conceive of politics ‘internally’, in terms of their own specificity, without reference to what Lazarus calls ‘external invariants’. In fact, it was only in the Bolshevik mode that the party had a central role within subjectivity. In all cases there was a multiplicity of sites, and a political distance from the state was maintained. Any emancipatory consciousness is purely political and exists under the conditions of an excess over spontaneous forms of consciousness, which are generally expressive of existing social relations and hierarchies. In addition, two modes of politics are identified by Lazarus, each of which focuses political subjectivity on an ‘external invariant’, namely the state. These are the Parliamentary mode and the Stalinist mode; both of these have been dominant in 20th-century world history, according to Lazarus. For both these modes, political subjectivity is subordinated to a state subjectivity. The principle of parliamentary politics is not that ‘people think’ but rather that ‘people have opinions regarding government’ (Lazarus, 1996: 93, my translation). ‘The so-called “political” parties of the parliamentary mode, far from representing the diversity of opinions, are the subjective organisers of the fact that the only thought deemed possible is an opinion regarding the government’ (p. 93).

It follows that parties are not so much political organisations as state organisations, which end up distributing state positions among members of the elite. Thus, for the Parliamentary mode there is only one recognised site of politics and that is the state. Similar functions are fulfilled in this mode by trade unions, which are also very much state organisations. The essential political act of parliamentarianism is voting, as the institutional articulation between the subjective side of opinion and the objective character of government. Voting does not so much serve to represent opinions as to produce a majority of professional politicians who are provided by parties; ‘it transforms the plural subjectivity of opinions on government into a functioning unity’ founded on consensus (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1993: 117). The act of ‘voting transforms vague “programmes” or promises of parties into the authority of a consensus’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994: 249). In other words, voting amounts to a legitimising principle of the state consensus, and politics is ultimately reduced to a question of numbers.

The Stalinist mode of politics refers to a political subjectivity that existed not just in the Soviet Union, but also throughout the communist parties linked to the Third International. Politics is confined to the party and the party is understood to be the very embodiment of that consciousness. ‘As the party is presented as the source of all political truth’, the Stalinist mode ‘requires the credibility of the party’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994: 250). The one-party state is the only political datum provided to subjectivity and the only practical domain of that subjectivity. The only site of politics is the state-party. The sequence of this mode begins during the early 1930s and ends with Gorbachev’s accession to power (Lazarus, 1996: 94). Of course, other modes of politics can also be elucidated, and I shall have occasion to refer to some of these in the arguments that follow throughout this book. The point to stress in this context is that modes of politics ‘in externality’, as they are modes of state politics, can quite easily be found in continuity with each other: for example, a colonial and certain postcolonial forms of politics, while possibly of a different character, may be founded on similar subjectivities in some fundamental respects. We will see in a later chapter that it is possible to characterise state politics in Africa today as neo-colonial, founded in particular on the reality that the postcolonial state today considers the majority of its people as the enemy. The continuity of such state politics is made possible precisely by the fact that all state politics have common underlying elements, most obviously politics expressive of interests.

I will show in my discussion of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in chapter 2 that we can indeed speak of a unique mode of politics between 1791 and 1796, which is thought ‘in interiority’ and which by the latter date has become saturated. Thereafter, various forms of militarism become dominant, while subsequently ex-slaves think their freedom in terms of a politics that insists on their economic independence. A subjective as well as social distance from the state is established until its collapse through the systematic deployment of state violence in the 1960s. There is a discontinuity here between political subjectivities, whose character Lazarus’s categories can help us to elucidate in their own terms. What is clear in this particular example is the centrality of the slaves’ and subsequently the ex-slaves’ own practices and thinking – particularly of the bossales (those born in Africa) – in effectuating these subjectivities.

THE EVENT, THE POLITICAL SUBJECT AND THE PROCESS OF SUBJECTIVATION

Let me now briefly expand on some of the categories and concepts already mentioned from Badiou’s work, which will enable me to delineate the sequences I shall be discussing in this book with greater precision. As I have noted, the core concept in Badiou’s philosophy of change is that of the ‘event’. This is what ‘brings to pass “something other” than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledges; the event is a hazardous, unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears’ (Badiou, 2001: 67).

The event is both situated – it is the event of this or that situation – and supplementary; thus absolutely detached from, or unrelated to, all the rules of the situation ... You may then ask what it is that makes the connection between the event and that ‘for which’ it is an event. This connection is the void of the earlier situation. What does this mean? It means that at the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organised the plenitude (or the stable multiples) of the situation in question ... We may say that since a situation is composed of the knowledges circulating within it, the event names the void inasmuch as it names the not-known of the situation. To take a well-known example: Marx is an event for political thought because he designates, under the name ‘proletariat’, the central void of early bourgeois societies. For the proletariat – being entirely dispossessed, and absent from the political stage – is that around which is organized the complacent plenitude established by the rule of those who possess capital. To sum up: the fundamental ontological characteristic of an event is to inscribe, to name, the situated void of that for which it is an event (2001: 68–9).

An event names the void, the absence, what is considered simply impossible, that which is not conceivable from within the knowledges of the situation. Badiou puts it in this way: ‘It is that which is not there which is important. The appearing of that which is not there; this is the origin of every real subjective power!’ (Badiou, 2006b: 3, my translation). For example, it was quite impossible for European Enlightenment thinkers to comprehend that slaves could be fully human, that they could reason, organise and be victorious over the armies of the imperial powers of the time. The slaves’ affirmation that they were human was precisely a subjective power that indicated the void of Enlightenment thought, according to which only some people were fully human. Today it is impossible to conceive an emancipatory politics from within the subjective parameters of liberalism and state democracy, a politics of ethnic equality is inconceivable from within a politics of ethnic genocide, and so on. The event is something that is both located within the extant and that points to alternatives to what exists, to the possibility of something different. It is thus a singularity before it may become a universal or eternal truth – ‘an immanent exception in the world where it arises’ (Badiou, 2013f) – with the result that ‘truth is the absolute condition of freedom’ (Badiou, 2014a).²⁷ In Žižek’s somewhat Hegelian but easily recognisable formulation:

The authentic moment of discovery, the breakthrough, occurs when a properly universal dimension explodes from within a particular context and becomes ‘for-itself’, and is directly experienced as universal. The universality-for-itself is not simply external to or above its particular context: it is inscribed within it. It perturbs and affects it from within, so that the identity of the particular is split into its particular and universal aspects (Žižek, 2008: 129, emphasis in original).

In politics today, and in Africa in particular, which is what concerns us here, a political event would be expected to point us – from within the situation or world itself – towards a different way of engaging in and thinking about politics, beyond the one-way thinking of neo-liberalism and its form of democracy. For outside hegemonic political liberalism today, all that exists is a void; in other words, alternative modes of politics are considered to be impossible, utopian, impracticable. When events happen, they force us, for a while at least, to think of the situation differently. Popular upsurges, however brief, if they are indeed powerful enough, force new issues onto the agenda; for example, they enable changes in thought in the ‘public sphere’. In Badiou’s more recent work (e.g. Badiou, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c), a complex theory is developed in which the event is understood as a specific form of becoming that inaugurates real change (he calls this a ‘site’) with maximum existence (which he calls a ‘singularity’) and with maximal consequences. A singularity with non-maximal consequences he calls a ‘weak singularity’, while sites with non-maximal existence he simply calls ‘facts’. ‘Modifications’ are those forms of becoming without real change (Badiou, 2009a: 363–80). In the same work, Badiou now speaks of ‘worlds’ rather than ‘situations’ as he did earlier: ‘There is no stronger transcendental consequence than the one which makes what did not exist in a world appear within it’ (Badiou, 2009a: 376). The popular struggles in different parts of Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, a period that was optimistically referred to as the ‘second liberation’ of the continent, forced new issues onto the agenda for a while, before these were again pushed into the background as state politics re-established itself (see Ake, 1996). Apart from the specific case of South Africa from 1984 to 1986, most of these changes were arguably simply facts or weak singularities, such as the ‘Marikana moment’ in South Africa in August 2012, which I discuss in detail in a later chapter.²⁸

The other major concept of Badiou’s philosophy is the subject. For Badiou, the subject is the ‘active ... bearer of [a] dialectical overcoming ... Borne by an active intraworldly body, a subject prescribes the effects of this body and their consequences by introducing a cut and a tension into the organisation of places’ (2009a: 45). The political subject thus contests social places. A subject is not to be conflated with an individual – ‘an individual is not a subject “spontaneously”’ (Badiou, 2011e: 12, my translation) – in politics a subject is, in fact, always collective. A political subject is thus much more than a mere bearer of agency; it is a collective body made up of individuals who have ‘decided to become part of a political truth procedure; to become in short ... militant[s] of this truth’ (Badiou, 2009c: 184, my translation). Such an individual is ‘an active part of this new subject’ (p. 185). The political subject is both active and ‘excessive’ (or ‘prescriptive’) in the sense that it exceeds in thought and practice the complexity of the given extant of social relations, ideologies, places, hierarchies, divisions of labour, etc. For example, the slaves of Saint-Domingue formed themselves into a political subject by affirming their humanity collectively. Badiou continues by arguing that a subject is formed in particular through fidelity to an event and that this fidelity gives rise to a truth which is universal (or eternal). A truth is thus produced and not discovered; a subject is also produced as a result of a process. Moreover, a truth procedure is that process which produces a real change in a particular world. It should also be noted in passing that for Badiou there are four truth procedures (politics, science, love and art), but here I am only concerned with politics. This process of political subjectivation (or subjectification or subjectivisation) must therefore be studied rationally, as its characteristics cannot be known in advance, for these are not expressive; we are no longer within the perspective of a (class, national, ethnic) consciousness produced by a party of intellectuals according to pre-given theory.

Finally, a singularity that may give rise to a universal and eternal truth is always specifically located and is in excess of what exists in that location; in other words, it must cut across – interrupt in a singular manner – the specifics of a particular situation or world in order to give rise to a universal. In sum, for Badiou, subjects are not the result of state interpellations or discourses of power. It is not a Foucauldian analysis which is of relevance here; subjects exist only in so far as these retain a fidelity to the consequences of an event (past or present) which makes possible the excess over the extant; they become the subject of a truth of this event. It is thus the sustainment of a politics of excess which produces subjects; this cannot be thought of as an ‘automatic process’ but only as one of conscious becoming.²⁹ Badiou has recently argued that the new subjects produced by an event in a world are of different kinds and are not limited to the faithful subject. He now recognises that an event also creates new forms of subjects through reaction and obscurantism. In so far as political subjects are concerned:

The world exposes a variant of the gap between the state and the affirmative capacity of the mass of people ... A body comes to be constructed under the injunction of [the evental trace] which always takes the form of an organisation. Articulated point by point, the subjectivated body permits the production of a present which we can call, to borrow a concept from Sylvain Lazarus, a ‘historical mode of politics’. Empirically speaking this is a political sequence (73–71 BC for Spartacus, 1905–17 for Bolshevism, 1792–94 for the Jacobins, 1965–68 for the Cultural Revolution in China ...). The reactive subject carries the reactionary inventions of the sequence (the new form of resistance to the new) into the heart of the people [le peuple] or of people in general [les gens]. For a long time this has taken the form of reaction. The names of reaction are sometimes typical of the sequence, for instance ‘Thermidorian’ for the French Revolution, or ‘Modern Revisionists’ for the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The obscure subject engineers the destruction of the body: the appropriate word is fascism, but in a broader sense than the fascism of the thirties. One will speak of generic fascism to describe the destruction of the organised body through which the construction of the present (of the sequence) had previously passed (Badiou, 2009a: 72, translation modified).³⁰

Here Badiou refers us back to Lazarus’s categories for the analysis of politics as a sequential subjectivity. In addition, in this argument, the faithful subject, the reactive subject and the obscure subject are all contemporary to the excessive novelty to which they react. The roles of these three subjects may be said to be as follows:

As the militant orientation of its own becoming, the faithful subject weaves the present of the body as a new time of truth. The reactive subject is all which orients the conservation of previous economic and political forms (capitalism and parliamentary democracy) in the conditions of existence of the new body ... The obscure subject wants the death of the new body (Badiou, 2009b: 107–8, 109, emphasis in original).

Badiou develops the distinction between the reactive and obscure subjects at some length:

It is crucial to gauge the gap between reactive formalism and obscure formalism. As violent as it may be, reaction conserves the form of the faithful subject as its articulated unconscious. It does not propose to abolish the present, only to show that the faithful rupture (which it calls ‘violence’ or ‘terrorism’) is useless for engendering a moderate, that is to say extinguished, present (a present that it calls ‘modern’) ... Things stand differently for the obscure subject. That is because it is the present that is directly its unconscious, its lethal disturbance, while it disarticulates within appearance the formal data of fidelity ... [It entertains] everywhere and at all times the hatred of any living thought, of any transparent language and of every uncertain becoming (2009a: 61, cit. Power and Toscano, 2009: 29, translation modified).

In addition, Badiou makes the important point that whatever the seeming victory of reaction or obscurantism, a subject can be reactivated ‘in another logic of its appearing-in-truth’; this he calls a ‘resurrection’ (2009a: 65). The example he gives is instructive. He refers to the ‘resurrection’ of the slave rebellion led by Spartacus in 73–71 BC, first by Toussaint Louverture in Saint-Domingue, who was referred to as the ‘Black Spartacus’ by General Laveaux in 1796, and second in 1919 by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who called themselves ‘Spartakists’. He concludes: ‘the subject whose name is “Spartacus” travels from world to world through the centuries. Ancient Spartacus, Black Spartacus, Red Spartacus’ (p. 65). In this way a new event, a new trace and a new body are generated, and previously occluded events are extracted from their occlusion, are remembered and recaptured politically.³¹ Finally, Badiou notes that ‘the turnstile of the three subjective types defines a sequence of history’ (2009b: 111), meaning that the manner in which these three subjects interrelate may enable us to delimit a sequence³² and help us to know its truth:

One must start patiently from events and from the construction of the truths which follow. Then accept that reaction and its extreme forms are also novelties which are contemporary to the post-evental present which signals the existence of the subjectivatable body. And finally hold that the confused appearance of history results from the fact that the mix of subjective orientations cannot be calculated from its result. Because one will know the True only in so far as it will arrive at the eternity of which it is capable, via its successive ups and downs as it confronts reactionary and obscure novelties. Therefore, one will know it – in the sense of what is really meant by knowing – when detached from its present, and hence from the confused world which saw its birth. It is only when it is arranged in another world in order for it to be used to new ends of incorporation that its resurrection will deliver it as it stands. A truth is only universal in the future anterior of the bodily process which makes it appear (Badiou 2009b: 113, my translation).

As I shall show in this book, reactive and obscure subjectivities do not recognise politics as an affirmation. They always reduce political subjectivity to a social foundation and thus, at best, conflate it with the political and, at worst, see within it only the pathological, so that a sequence cannot be thought at all, with the result that the period becomes illegible. Politics as affirmation, as thought, as ‘excess’, cannot be grasped as representation, as it is always (at least partly) excessive of the social; yet, in the concrete conditions of its unique singularity, it is simultaneously related to the social in some way, simply because excess is always internal to the situation of that which it exceeds.³³ It is at this point that empirical investigation is important in order to elucidate the unique specifics of this relation. By recognising this complex excessive–expressive dialectic, one can begin to try to show how major transformations by Africans were affirmed so that they are just not understandable as simple expressions of the social location of their participants, either through a vulgar state perspective, or through a more sophisticated history or social science (e.g. a ‘sociology of social movements’) which has insisted on visualising the subjective as a ‘reflection’ or ‘representation’ of the objectively social.

Incidentally, it should be noted that it is this quality of social science which lies at the foundation of its common Eurocentrism, governed as it is by a scientistic episteme. I shall have occasion to return to this point below, but it is important to note at this stage that, given that the social sciences as presently constituted do not have the capacity to comprehend affirmative subjectivities, they are perforce not able to recognise African subjective affirmations; as a result, the Third World subaltern is unable to be heard through their medium (Saïd, 1995; Spivak, 1988; Lalu, 2009). These disciplines can only refer such affirmations to social categories that have tended to be ultimately European in their referents, or even reduce them on occasion to psychological aberrations or social pathologies, evident in colonial literature and characteristic of reactive and obscure subjectivities. The difficulties which the discipline of anthropology in particular has faced historically in this regard are well known, as are its colonial roots, yet the problem is arguably one which extends beyond anthropology and which has fundamentally epistemic roots (Foucault, 1980). It is such Eurocentrism, endemic to what might be called ‘epistemic reason’, which is arguably to be found at the core of both a reactive and an obscure state subjectivity.

In order to fill the obvious lacuna created by the absence of the subjectivity of politics, the social sciences have made ubiquitous empty gestural references to the importance of considering agency, along with having recourse to (social) psychological accounts, all of which have had necessary depoliticising effects.³⁴ In a very important essay, Hannah Arendt (2006) has argued that – in the Western philosophical tradition – this depoliticisation of politics, the result of equating freedom with individual will and hence of seeing it as an issue of psychology, was first put forward through the divorcing of freedom from agency and its attachment to simple consciousness. The main thinker in this regard was Saint Augustine, who substituted the Christian ‘free interiority’ of the individual for the classical Greek understanding of freedom as human agency, a view which has persisted into democratic liberalism today.³⁵ In this view, an individual can be totally politically passive and apathetic and still be an agent exercising her ‘freedom’, as freedom is considered a matter of individual will. The similarity with the idea of ‘market freedom’, in which the subject is said to exercise her freedom by being a passive consumer, should be clear. One must therefore first detach agency from its idealist underpinnings and then follow Badiou in thinking the subject as the bearer of excess. As a result, the idea of the subject must be de-psychologised in order to provide a materialist analysis of subjectivity; this can be done, it seems to me, by adhering to both Badiou’s and Lazarus’s theoretical innovations, which see subjects as the bearers of excessive subjectivities and not as given by their simple biological existence and (social) consciousness. In sum, the point is to recognise that politics exists beyond identity, that it must not be conflated with the political, and that therefore, if it is to be the object of rigorous thought, it cannot be reduced to the psychology of individuals, to consciousness, to power or to the state. An emancipatory politics, in particular, consists fundamentally of an affirmative subjectivity which is both singular and universal in nature, while other qualitatively different subjectivities are usually formed in reaction to it.

In outlining the categories which Lazarus and Badiou use to understand politics, my objective has been to lay the foundation for an analysis of political subjectivities deployed by Africans, particularly emancipatory politics, wherever they are to be found on the African continent. In order to do this, it should be clear that we need to be able to assess politics as pure affirmation and to demarcate it from state and (neo-) colonial subjectivities; these are always reduced to social categories with the result that politics is understood as being located within a social matrix, and political consciousness as simply epiphenomenal. In this view, politics is overwhelmingly grasped as ‘representing’ class, nation, ethnicity and any number of social entities, and in consequence all politics is seen in one way or another as identity politics. The reactive subject in Africa, founded precisely on a representative conception of subjectivity, can be most obviously recognised in the politics of the first phase of the postcolonial or nationalist state (1955–79), while the obscure subject has generally been, and is still, located within (neo-)colonial or apartheid-type political subjectivities.

There are three major historical sequences which frame the discussion in Part 1. The first is the struggle for emancipation from slavery in Saint-Domingue in the 18th century, followed by Haiti in the 19th. This struggle was dominated by Africans (slaves born in Africa) who equated freedom not only with the legal abolition of slavery, but also with popular access to independent peasant land-parcels. The struggle itself can be divided into a number of political sequences and carries over in a different form altogether in post-independence Haiti. The second set of sequences consists of those revolving around the struggles for national liberation on the African continent broadly speaking, limited by the years 1945 and 1975. Here freedom is identified principally with the attainment of independent statehood, yet the state is also thought of as the provider of the material conditions for greater equality within the nation. The third is a new subjective political sequence inaugurated by the struggle for liberation in South Africa in the mid-1980s, in which freedom is equated subjectively with increased forms of control over daily life by people themselves; this, I argue, forms a new politics of emancipation for the 21st century.

Chapter 2 is concerned to expand on the idea that people think by uncovering the political subjectivities of Africans in their struggle against slavery in Saint-Domingue. I deal specifically with the political agency of Africans in making world history through their emancipatory struggles in Saint-Domingue and Haiti. These struggles are of fundamental universal significance, for they affirmed the truth of a universal humanity for the first time during the modern period, something which the French and American revolutions did not do. I suggest that, at least during the period 1791–6, a specific subjective mode of politics can be identified during these struggles, which could be named the Human Freedom mode of politics. I argue that while ‘universal human rights’ were fought for in this struggle for the first time, these cannot be equated with the contemporary use of this expression, as they were founded on a notion of ‘natural right’, which is absent today. I also show that after achieving their legal freedom, the ex-slaves fought for a prescriptive understanding of economic independence from the state, which they eventually won after Haitian independence in 1804. The formation of an egalitarian system on peasant parcels, regulated through a culture of equality derived from African precepts, lasted, broadly speaking, until the 1960s.

In chapter 3, I move to an analysis of the question of a historical explanation of emancipation, in the 20th century in particular but by no means exclusively. This question is broached through an assessment of the literature on the Mau Mau (itungati) rebellion or insurrection in Kenya in the 1950s, particularly that which attempts an understanding of the subjectivity of the rebels. It expands this discussion by means of a critical engagement with the work of Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies School in India, which deals with the epistemological issues of attempting to understand anti-colonial subaltern political subjectivity in greater depth. I conclude that the discipline of history in its current form is limited by its epistemic reason, which is reflected in its inability to conceptualise adequately the thought of popular rebellions in their own terms. The result is therefore a fundamental inability to see people as rational beings.

Chapter 4 introduces some of the problems associated with the understanding of freedom and emancipation through the struggle for national liberation. In particular it is concerned in the first part to understand the idea of the nation as a political affirmation and emancipatory vision, and in the second part to deal in greater depth with the subjectivity of what I term the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa between, say, 1945 and 1975. The first part looks explicitly at Fanon’s thought in his famous chapter of The Wretched of the Earth on the ‘pitfalls of national consciousness’. It stresses the exceptionally inventive thinking that characterises Fanon, who sees ‘national consciousness’ as a pure affirmation, and also traces the limits of his thought in the stress he puts on the party form of organisation. The second part of the chapter extends the analysis beyond Fanon to outline the characteristics of the National Liberation Struggle mode of politics more fully. This mode of politics was characterised by equating the nation with the people, while simultaneously thinking freedom in terms of a new state form. This somewhat contradictory subjectivity combined emancipatory politics at a distance from state thinking with the vision of a new state providing freedom to the people. It was meant to be embodied in a party or organised ‘national liberation movement’ which was said to represent the nation and which saw freedom as achievable primarily through military means. The argument uncovers both the excessive and the expressive sides to this mode, thus exposing its subjective limits.

Chapter 5 goes on to show how the popular struggle during the 1980s in South Africa exceeded the limitations of the National Liberation Struggle mode and invented a popularly grounded way of thinking politics, whose subjectivity was founded on the daily lives of ordinary people. In this sense it constituted a radical break from the national liberation struggle way of thinking politics. This new mode of politics was not focused subjectively on attaining state power and was therefore in a position to invent new political subjectivities for a short period. These, I argue, went on to define a new mode of politics which I name the People’s Power mode of politics. It had a limited existence from September 1984 to mid-1986 and was present in a limited number of sites. The originality of this mode was the fact that it showed that political emancipation could be thought outside the party form of organisation and its guerrilla army, and through the collectively developed subjectivities of a mass movement for freedom. This mode of politics was arguably replicated in several respects in the North African rebellions in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011, which is why it can be said to constitute a new 21st-century mode. However, its limits were reached by its deferring to the exiled party, the African National Congress (ANC), as the legitimate inheritor of state power.

Chapter 6 examines the collapse of this emancipatory national vision into national chauvinism in South Africa between 1973 and 2013. It therefore takes a longer view of political subjectivity in South Africa, starting from the affirmation of anti-racialism invented by the Black Consciousness intellectual movement, of which Steve Biko was the main thinker, right up to the near present. Its objective is to outline the subjective transformation of emancipatory nationalist thought from an affirmative and thus emancipatory understanding of the people-nation into the national chauvinism prevalent today in South Africa. The process is accounted for in terms of the depoliticisation of the idea of the nation and its replacement by a state conception founded on indigeneity. The idea is to outline the reactive and obscure subjectivities present within the post-apartheid state. The changing sequences of state subjectivities after 1990 are followed up to a sequence dominated by a state subjectivity of national chauvinism and rising violence.

Chapter 7 critically examines the currently dominant ways of understanding militancy or activism through the notions of civil society, parties, social movements, citizenship and human rights. It argues that these notions are in themselves inadequate for thinking a politics of emancipation, for they operate strictly within state modes of thought. Parties refer to organised interests in political society (the state itself); NGOs and social movements refer to organised interests of citizens within a civil society that provides the domain within which such interests are deployed and which is legitimised by the state. Politics cannot be reduced to agency in social history for example. Moreover, citizens, whether passive or active, are deemed to possess rights within civil society according to neo-liberal thought, a notion that only partially conforms to reality on the continent, for many people do not have the right to rights.

I conclude Part 1 with two short case studies, assessing the existence of different modes of politics in two different social movements in South Africa during the post-apartheid period: one operating within the realm of civil society and another maintaining itself firmly beyond civil society and transcending those subjective limits. I suggest that it is with respect to the latter that a fidelity to the event of 1984–6 is clearly apparent. I show that the movement operating within the confines of civil society (the Treatment Action Campaign) thinks its politics in terms of state subjectivities, while the one operating beyond the limits of civil society (Abahlali base-Mjondolo) is able to think politics at a distance from the state in several respects. This analysis of different examples of popular politics in post-apartheid South Africa closes the discussion of politics in history through an argument that suggests that Abahlali baseMjondolo are currently thinking in excess of state politics, in fidelity to the event of the 1980s.

NOTES

1.In other words, at a minimum, politics only exists when the oppressed move beyond ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott, 1990) and explicitly engage in a collective practice of changing the world.

2.The original says: ‘Il faut entendre par empirisme l’idée qu’on doit tout fonder sur une passivité primordiale qui est comme une cumulation des effets de l’extérieur’ (Badiou, 2013f, 14 November 2012).

3.What the French call ‘un garde fou’; in other words, in this case a limit to intellectual escapism.

4.The politics of resistance to colonialism have at times taken extreme forms of collective self-immolation. A well-known example here is the destruction of their cattle herds by the amaXhosa in 1856–7 as a result of a prophecy by a young woman, Nongqawuse. The so-called cattle-killing movement has been read as a form of resistance of a ‘millenarian’ type and hence as in some way ‘excessive’. See Peires (1989) and Bradford (1996), for example. It should be stressed that, in the manner in which I use the concept here, this episode, although extreme by any standards, cannot be understood as excessive, as it did not hold to a universal conception of equality; to use the categories of political resistance for such a self-destructive episode seems incongruous in the extreme. This is not to deny that millenarian movements could have powerful anti-colonial appeal; see Bradford (2007). Millenarian movements have, of course, been understood as socially located.

5.See, in this context, the debates in both Africa and India surrounding the limits of colonialism, in particular in Ajayi (1969) and Chatterjee (1993). I am grateful to Jeremiah Orowosegbe for reminding me of these.

6.As in the following statement: ‘The [African] continent seems to be administered more and more from outside without any of the sources of its instability such as the iniquity and violence of global relations ever being questioned’ (Le Monde diplomatique, no. 671, February 2010, p. 21, my translation).

7.‘This profound breach in the expanse of continuities, though it must be analysed, and minutely so, cannot be “explained” or even summed up in a single word. It is a radical event that is distributed across the entire visible surface of knowledge’ (Foucault, 2003a: 236).

8.‘The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea’ (Hegel, 1952: 80). Hegel is absolutely correct to note that continuity in history can only be an indication of a state subjectivity (e.g. development, progress, modernisation, etc.).

9.Following the work of Moses Finley on Ancient Greece (e.g. 1985); see Neocosmos (2009a).

10.Of course, many other struggles, particularly anti-slavery and anti-colonial struggles, have taken place; the ones which come particularly to mind are those of national (ethnic) and religious inspiration which occurred between the 1880s and 1920s in Africa, but these will not be considered here, primarily due to limits of space.

11.James Scott’s (1990) very important book, which deals with what he calls ‘hidden’ and ‘public transcripts’ of popular politics, while drawing attention to an important feature of subaltern thinking, equates all forms of subjective resistance with politics. There is no attempt to think when resistance is political and when it is not, and he does not recognise a concept of subjective excess or one of subjectivation. Contrary to this perspective, it will be argued at length here that not all forms of resistance are political (in the sense of possessing an emancipatory content), as resistance is a constant feature of oppressive power relations and may be manifested in all sorts of political subjectivities, some of which may be precisely reactionary.

12.See Mamdani (1990). The entrance of terms such as ‘governance’, ‘civil society’ and ‘human rights’ unquestioningly into our daily discourse is only a small example of such ideological dominance today.

13.Wallerstein (1995), for example, shows that both conservative and socialist strategies in 19th-century Europe gradually came close, from different starting points, ‘to the liberal notion of ongoing, [state-] managed, rational normal change’ (p. 96). He also notes that between 1848 and 1914, ‘the practitioners of all three ideologies turned from a theoretical anti-state position to one of seeking to strengthen and reinforce in practice the state structures in multiple ways’. Later, conservatives were transformed into liberal-conservatives, while Leninists were transformed into liberal-socialists; he argues that the first break in the liberal consensus at the global level occurred in 1968 (pp. 97, 103).

14.Perhaps the most obvious example was Margaret Thatcher’s injunction in the 1980s that ‘There is no alternative’ to neo-liberalism, a slogan often repeated in the 1990s in South Africa by the African National Congress (ANC).

15.In his latest work, Badiou suggests that ‘in the world as it exists today there is no positive usage of identitarian categories’ (Badiou, 2014a, 6 November 2013, my translation).

16.Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba (pers. comm., 22/01/2007).

17.Lazarus refers in particular to an essay called ‘Myth, Memory and History’ in Finley (1975).

18.The idea of ‘invention’ here is similar to the one used by Ranger, Vail and others in the notion of the ‘invention’ of tradition or ethnicity; i.e. it refers to a subjectivity that is being thought for the first time. The difference with Ranger’s notion consists primarily in the fact that Ranger’s understanding of ‘ethnic politics’ is a state politics, what could be named the ‘communitarian mode of politics’, which is a mode that fuses state and culture. See Ranger (1985b, 1993) and Vail (1989). For Moses Finley, the political subjectivity of the Greeks is thought separately from the state. According to Finley, it was precisely this ‘sense of community’ founded on active citizenship which was the idea at the core of Athenian democracy: ‘it was that sense of community ... fortified by the state religion, by their myths and their traditions, which was an essential element in the pragmatic success of the Athenian democracy’ (1985: 29).

19.One is tempted to see ‘the invisible hand of the market’ as one such contemporary myth.

20.Following Lacanian categories, politics is real, history is imagined and, for Badiou, the idea of communism is the symbolic link between the two; see Badiou (2011e: 13).

21.Moreover, as I shall have occasion to note in chapter 7, for Lenin a proletariat was not simply given in early 20th-century Russia, either socio-economically or especially politically; it had to ‘demarcate’ itself from other classes. Socio-economically, in an overwhelmingly peasant country, it had to demarcate itself from classes emanating from a disintegrating peasantry; politically, it demarcated itself from other classes precisely by developing ‘its’ own political positions on the issues of the day through the medium of ‘its’ (social-democratic) party.

22.For such an outline, see Lazarus (1996: 136–52).

23.See Foucault (1968, 1980, 2003a).

24.Lenin’s writings during this period have recently been collected and edited by Slavoj Žižek; see Lenin (2002).

25.I have shown elsewhere at length how such a process of depoliticisation unfolded in South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s; see Neocosmos (1998). I shall have occasion to return to this argument in later chapters.

26.For a detailed history of the soviets in Russia and their disappearance, see Anweiler (1972).

27.For Badiou, the immanent exception in politics is the ‘idea of communism’. For him, communism is a political subjectivity which always contains elements of anti-statism and egalitarianism; more broadly, it consists of a politics which is both particular and localised and is also addressed universally (Badiou, 2011e: 11).

28.An idea, such as that of the event, which denotes the always located hazardous unpredictable is not unique to Badiou; for example, the idea of the ‘clinamen’, derived from the work of the early materialists (Lucretius, Democritus, Epicurus) and discussed by Althusser in his later work on ‘Aleatory Materialism’, and to some extent Arendt’s much more theological notion of the ‘miracle’ are not altogether far removed from Badiou’s conception. However, Badiou (1988) is the only one who has theorised this concept in great detail and has located it materially in modern philosophy. As he stresses himself: ‘there is nothing theological or metaphysical in my conception of an event’ (Badiou, 2011e: 14, my translation). See Arendt (2006) and Althusser (1994). For an introduction to the idea of the event, see Žižek (2014).

29.In particular for my specific concerns, one cannot refer, for example, to a ‘colonial subject’ as produced by the colonial state but only in relation to an excessive event such as a national liberation struggle during which such a subject overcomes its colonial condition. The notion of the ‘colonial subject’ is thus an oxymoron. Whether in fact colonial domination could be seen as an event or as the simulacrum of an event for the precolonial world is another question, which can only be adequately addressed elsewhere.

30.See Badiou (2005a: ch. 9) for a discussion of his notion of ‘Thermidorian’ and Badiou (2006a: Part 3, ch. 2) for his detailed assessment of the Cultural Revolution in China.

31.It should be stressed that the core operation here concerns politics and not memory; the latter is a function of the former.

32.I am grateful to Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba for reminding me of this point. For discussions of some important issues in Badiou’s typology of evental subjectivities, see Žižek (2007) and Power and Toscano (2009).

33.‘The real is simultaneously in its place and in excess of this place’ (Badiou et al., 1972: 229, my translation).

34.One recent attempt to account explicitly for the manifestations or absences of political agency in terms of psychological perspectives is to be found in Cohen (2001).

35.Moses Finley cites Pericles (from Thucydides) as saying: ‘we consider anyone who does not share in the life of the citizen not as minding his own business but as useless’ (1985: 30), a remark which illustrates clearly the Greek conception of politics as agency. Fanon’s equivalent was: ‘every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor’ (1990: 161).