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Preface

This natural disposition to think ... is the real meaning of humanity.

– Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, 1377

Homo cogitat – Man thinks.

– Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, 1677

At the present time, the world is at an impasse. This can only mean one thing: not that there is no way out, but that the time has come to abandon all the old ways, which have led to fraud, tyranny, and murder.

– Aimé Césaire, letter to Maurice Thorez, 24 October 1956

I do not identify with my origin, nor do I deny it, but my trajectory as a subject pushes me elsewhere.

– Frantz Fanon, cited by Alice Cherki, Fanon: A Portrait

How are we to begin to think human emancipation in Africa today after the collapse of the Marxist, the Third World nationalist as well as the neo-liberal visions of freedom? How are we to conceptualise an emancipatory future governed by a fidelity to the idea of a universal humanity in a context where humanity no longer features within our ambit of thought and when previous ways of thinking emancipation have become obsolete? In the formulation made famous by Frantz Fanon on the last page of The Wretched of the Earth, how are we to ‘work out new concepts’ for a new humanism? This book seeks answers to these questions in the light of what has become apparent, namely the absence of a thought of politics within all three of these conceptions of universal history today. This may seem paradoxical, but if we are to understand politics as a collective thought-practice – as that which constitutes human collective agency – then it should be clear that all three have substituted, in one way or another, the idea of power, that of the state, for human agency itself. The state may have been understood as the main agent of social change; however, it is not the agent of universal history. Only the people themselves can fulfil that role.

These kinds of questions have become particularly urgent for the simple reason that millions of people worldwide, a large proportion of whom live on the African continent, are simply condemned to being unable to acquire the basic necessities of life, disconnected as they are from (formal) market relations, whether as buyers and consumers or as sellers of their labour power. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that 75 million young people worldwide were unemployed in 2015,¹ although, of course, employment in itself does not guarantee escape from poverty and is frequently overestimated in the Global South, where so-called informal economic activities are prevalent. It is important to reiterate the well-known point that, for the foreseeable future, large numbers of these young people will go through life without ever experiencing employment and will consequently have to survive the most intense economic frustrations throughout their lives. Denied the opportunity to be exploited in the labour process, they remain the mere waste of an inhumane capitalist system. Under such conditions, of course, and in the absence of an emancipatory vision for humanity, the recourse to nihilistic, self-immolating and scapegoating political practices is unfortunately predictable. The acquisition of self-worth requires, inter alia, the capacity to feel oneself capable of agency but such agency is constantly frustrated by the unforgiving, crushing weight of liberal capitalism, which produces more crises, more wars and the condemnation of greater and greater numbers to permanent exclusion. It remains not only to recognise this system for what it is, but also to begin to think ways of overcoming it in a manner appropriate to our times.

Until the 1980s it had been Marxism that provided a vision of some kind of alternative to the appalling inequalities, exploitation and oppression inherent in capitalism. The decline of Marxist analysis and its replacement in intellectual thinking by what has been called the ‘language turn’ in the social sciences and humanities has been intimately connected to the worldwide disintegration of Marxism’s alternative emancipatory vision, due in no small measure to its embodiment in frequently criminal states. At the same time, no political vision has been provided by its ostensible replacement other than a simple ideological return to liberal neo-colonial precepts in somewhat new forms. Moreover, postcolonial theory, which posited itself as an intellectual alternative to academic Marxism, as Hallward (2001: 64) observes, proved itself unable to provide ‘a specific political position with respect to global trends’; as a result, it has remained exclusively of academic interest. In addition, the monopoly over the vision of emancipation which neo-liberalism had subsequently been able to achieve in Africa after a brief period of popular upsurge in the 1980s (notably illustrated by Francis Fukuyama’s arrogant and hasty assertion of the end of history) has itself been slowly eroding in recent years, most obviously due to economic crises (particularly but not exclusively in the West), and also to a serious loss of legitimacy, as evidenced by worldwide popular revolts. These revolts have also drawn attention to the limits of an authoritarian form of liberal democracy that appears to be biased against the majority, as it regularly excludes popular voices. The most notable of these rebellions have taken place in North Africa and the Middle East and have extended to southern and other parts of Europe and the Americas, while the continuous unrest in communities throughout South Africa can also be seen to form part of this worldwide reaction. This occurs particularly as capital attempts to make ordinary people pay for its financial profligacy, while, at the same time, supposedly democratic states appear to be governed increasingly by a culture of demophobia. Since neo-liberal capitalism has obviously shown itself unable to provide an emancipatory vision for all but a small oligarchy of wealthy rulers, and its Marxist historical alternative has been tainted by its past association with authoritarian states, there seems to be little in terms of an egalitarian alternative available. Uhuru is proving elusive if not unattainable.

Related points could be made in relation to the African nationalist project in its universally applied statist form. Influenced in no small measure by Marxism from the 1950s to the 1970s, by 1980 state nationalism had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and external pressures; the replacement of the Organisation of African Unity by the African Union was one indication of this collapse and of its continued statism in a neo-liberal form. South Africa has been following this trend with a time lag of approximately two decades. While the ruling party and the state here have been plagued by the corrupting influences of capitalism and power, the vision of greater equality and freedom which had galvanised large numbers during the popular emancipatory upsurge of the 1980s has been heavily compromised, to the extent that ideas of the ‘public good’ or the ‘common good’ central to any notion of national freedom appear today to have vanished altogether from public discourse. A universal vision of an emancipatory future has been so eaten up by the gangrene of private accumulation through access to power that the state can no longer be said to represent the nation, the general interest. On the contrary, the fact that state power in Africa, independently of its ideological colour, has invariably been oppressive of the majority suggests that the problem resides within power itself, whether formally democratic or not. The Marikana massacre in South Africa, in which 34 miners were slaughtered by the police on a single day in August 2012, is only one powerful recent illustration of this fundamental collapse of an emancipatory vision and its replacement by the increasingly repressive practices of an ostensibly democratic state. At the same time, the simultaneous rise of Right-wing authoritarian nationalisms within so-called democratic societies has not bypassed Africa either. A globalised xenophobic politics is now pervasive. The dream of national liberation so prevalent in the 1960s in Africa, in spite of its brief revival in the 1980s, has thoroughly evaporated and been replaced by a vulgar simulacrum of its vision of freedom.

But to assert the end of history also amounts in fact to asserting the end of thought. At best, as the French philosopher Alain Badiou would say, all that is said to remain is opinions, all of which are of more or less equal value; not truths which are of universal value. Thus, to assert the end of history is at one and the same time to assert the finitude of thought and the absence of the truly human. Yet, as philosophy frequently has insisted, thought is eternal. In the words of the philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, thought is ‘in its essential nature, incapable of limitation ... [Moreover] it is in the progressive participation in the life of the apparently alien that thought demolishes the walls of its finitude and enjoys its potential infinitude’ (cit. Diagne, 2010: 44). We must therefore not allow ourselves to succumb to the intellectual laziness of opinion, particularly today, when the temptation to provide easy answers to complex problems is increasingly prevalent.

In order, then, to confront and overcome the crisis of thought, which has provided the conditions for quasi-fascist xenophobic politics to prevail from Nigeria to South Africa (not forgetting India, France, Greece, Russia, Italy and elsewhere), it is of crucial importance to develop new ideas of human emancipation, freedom and dignity; something which neo-liberal thought has abysmally failed to do, as it is obvious that it has presided over ever-widening inequalities. The core problem concerns precisely the provision of new concepts and categories that make a universal emancipatory egalitarian alternative thinkable again and understandable in what may be termed a ‘post-classist’ context. The classical Marxist view that there is a given subject of history, embodied in the social category of ‘the working class’, which will deliver humanity from capitalist oppression when its potential qualities are finally actualised, is no longer tenable. It is impossible to think universality through the simple deployment of identitarian particularities. The result of this problem has been that there is little left today in terms of a thought of emancipatory politics, with which to confront the massive increase in capitalist exploitation and oppression with its consequent economic disasters and wars resulting from unfettered plunder. These are combined with the political exclusion of greater and greater numbers of the world’s population from any ability to control, even in a minimal sense, their own lives – a fact which is itself arguably the main cause of the poverty that everyone deplores.

Of course, it is only from among the politically excluded that a political subject with an emancipatory politics can see the light of day; yet, at the same time, one cannot endow a specific social category in advance with the qualities required to propel history to a given end. Even though it is only the people who make universal history, who the people – more precisely, who the politically excluded – are in any specific situation differs, and they can only be recognised by what they think, say and do. The problem is fundamentally that social science today does not listen to what the excluded have to say; the knowledgeable apparently know what people think (or are supposed to think) in advance, for they speak for them, using a priori scientific categories. That large numbers of such excluded people live on the African continent is certainly not a new phenomenon, yet these people are still not being listened to, despite the historical exit of the colonial state. In fact, their numbers have been increasing under the depredations of an ever-violent and despoliating capitalism, while the fundamental features of colonialism, such as virulent racism and the view that the people constitute the enemy of reason and progress, continue to be crudely and uncritically reproduced.

Today it should be clear that there is no subject of history, neither is there an end to history. This means that there is no end to human agency; there is no end to politics, for politics is irreducible to the state, and this despite the fact that the horizon of emancipation is the disappearance of the state itself, for the notion of an ‘egalitarian state’ is simply an oxymoron. In order to rethink human emancipation (another word for equality) on the African continent, this book has of necessity therefore had to be a work of theory concerned with political subjectivities as objects of investigation and with developing categories for thinking an emancipatory future. It is not a work of history, even though there is much discussion of history in it. It is, rather, a book which opens up an area for investigation – that of emancipatory political subjectivities. It insists on approaching their understanding in a rational manner ‘from within’ – in other words, using their own terms and categories – and not exclusively as reflections or representations of something external to them such as social location within a complex matrix of social relations, or ‘Man’, or history, or culture, or state policies or even discourses of power, inter alia. Emancipatory politics concern not so much power relations as a process of subjectivation.

It follows that the exposition in this book is not chronological but is organised around theoretical questions: in Part 1, the question of understanding historical sequences of popular emancipation during which thought can be seen to exceed the notion, upheld by the discipline of history, of continuous objective time; and, in Part 2, the question of making sense of politics in its own terms and thus of exceeding the socially reductive analyses provided by the discipline of sociology. The absence of a chronological exposition has meant that there is some empirical toing and froing in the argument, although I have attempted to reduce this to a minimum. I thus pursue theoretical issues in depth in a rigorous manner and draw the appropriate consequences for the thinking of emancipatory politics on the continent. Although concerned with the whole of Africa, this book is more focused on South Africa than on any other African country. The easy availability of literature and data on this country, the sophistication of some of its political movements and my familiarity with it made this inevitable; the narrative, however, ends in early 2013, soon after the horrific episode of the Marikana massacre. Apart from Saint-Domingue/Haiti discussed in chapter 2, different parts of Africa feature as illustrations in different chapters: Congo in chapter 2, Kenya in chapter 3, Tanzania and Zimbabwe in chapter 10, the African state in general in chapters 12 and 13, Malawi in chapter 14, and other parts of the continent in chapter 15. It should go without saying that I include South Africa within Africa, which I do not consider as the (more or less exotic, more or less incapable) Other, as much of the South African literature tends to do. As a result, Africa is not considered here as a mere footnote to the South African historical experience; on the contrary, I maintain that South Africa is only understandable within an African historical and political context of colonialism and neo-colonialism.

This book has its origins in comments by two close friends of mine. The first is the Nigerian intellectual Adebayo Olukoshi, who insisted to me during a conversation in Uppsala in the 1990s that those historians who simply accounted for the struggles for independence on the African continent in terms of poverty and economic deprivation were not only empirically wrong but also guilty of racism, as they denied Africans the capacity to think their dignity and agency as human beings. Pushed to its logical conclusion, this argument suggested that in order to combat racism – like any form of oppression – both in intellectual work and in political practice, it is fundamental to begin from an understanding of what people who are struggling against oppression actually say themselves, and not to assume that a recourse to scientism – collapsing reason into power-knowledge – can substitute for thought. The second is the Congolese scholar and activist Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, who introduced me to the writings of Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus, with whom he had worked and who, he said, were thinking politics not as politicians but as militant activists. The result, he insisted, was that through using their work, one could begin to think new concepts and categories for a different political practice in Africa, which did not revolve around the taking of state power and the endless repetition of a politics of authoritarian statism. I have followed his advice. Given my personal experience of popular struggles for emancipation in South Africa in the 1980s and of their rapid deterioration into state politics, I was precisely in search of a way of overcoming this problem intellectually without collapsing into a crude notion of ‘betrayal of the revolution’ by a ‘petty bourgeoisie in search of state avenues for accumulation’. After all, ideas of ‘people’s power’ and ‘workers’ control’ seem to have penetrated mass popular consciousness in the 1980s in South Africa, and I was ideologically unprepared – like many others – for the rapidity with which such popular subjectivities were excluded and replaced by the crass corruption of what is sometimes known as ‘pork-barrel politics’.

This book is the result of this intellectual search. Its writing has been a long process. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, it has been in the making on and off for just under 20 years. The title, Thinking Freedom in Africa, is purposely designed to refer to a discussion of how ‘ordinary’ Africans themselves have thought freedom along with all its contradictions, as well as of how we can begin to think freedom in Africa in the 21st century in a ‘post-classist’ period, so to speak – when even most of those who call themselves Marxists no longer see the working class as the universal subject of history anyway, but merely use the notion as an abstract justification for their statist politics of self-appointed representation. What can be called ‘classism’ is now exhausted as a way of thinking emancipatory politics, yet in the 20th century it made crucially important contributions to thinking human emancipation, as it was able to defeat capitalist power across significant portions of the globe. However, at the same time, it proved unable to construct a sustainable viable alternative. Those who are committed to an emancipatory future cannot continue as before: for ‘all repetition dis-courages ... Courage is never the courage to recommence as before’ (Badiou, 2007: 98–9).

The subtitle, Toward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, is meant to convey the idea that the purpose of the book is not to propose a full-blown theory – not least because such a theory is largely contingent and always developed through practice – but rather to attempt to open up conceptual space in order to contribute towards making an emancipatory future thinkable in Africa again. As the reader will soon notice, the book’s foundational axiom – following upon the seminal work of Sylvain Lazarus – is that ‘people think’. In the absence of this point of departure the academic investigator or the political activist inevitably puts himself or herself in the position of trustee, interpreter or spokesperson for others who are located within what may be called a ‘subaltern’ position in society. The powerful simply speak on behalf of the powerless; a politics of representation becomes dominant and naturalised. Yet it is imperative to do away with such a notion of politics if human emancipation is to become again the object of thought, as a politics of representation is, ultimately, simply a politics of silencing. A politics of emancipation, on the other hand, is invariably concerned with presentation rather than with representation. When the South African shack-dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, or ‘People of the Shacks’, insist that activists and politicians speak ‘to’ them rather than ‘for’ them, they are underlining precisely such a politics of self-presentation.

This book has been written from within the Marxist tradition, but, as the reader will note, it is constantly in a critical debate with Marxist orthodoxy. The fundamental problems with Marxism are not to be found, to my mind, in its political economy even though that political economy may at times be Eurocentric. After all, if, as Marx insists, the period of modern capitalism dates from the discovery and colonisation of the Americas and ‘capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ (1867: 712), then colonialism, genocide and racism must be thought of as central to capitalism itself; consequently, the production process and hence, to a certain extent, the industrial working class must be shifted from its often unique position of privilege in our understanding of capitalism. Forms of colonial domination are as important as forms of labour exploitation for the reproduction of the capitalist system, yet the latter forms have been seen as primary and the former as somewhat secondary in what is usually referred to as Western Marxism. As a result, politics was thought of as secondary to and derivative of economics. Beyond the West, in the colonial world, it was not quite so easy to ignore the question of politics, because colonial capitalism was so evidently contingent on the deployment of violence and the systematic dehumanisation and extermination of colonised peoples. As C.L.R. James (2001) was one of the first to note, it was in the New World that colonial capitalism acquired its clearest expression and, hence, where its political roots were most obvious. Whereas in Europe it was the industrial factory that epitomised capitalism, in colonial capitalism in the Caribbean it was the slave plantation. Given the centrality of politics in colonial capitalist development, ‘economism’ has had greater difficulty in establishing theoretical roots in Marxist thought outside the West.

Nevertheless, despite their limitations, Marxist political-economic analyses remain crucially important in broad terms for an understanding of the differing forms of accumulation and exploitation in the world, including Africa today. The problems with Marxism are to be found elsewhere, in the political statism consequent upon thinking politics simply as a representation of interests made apparent precisely by political economy. The result has been that this political economy could easily remain, and did in fact become in post-independence Africa, a ‘doctrine of state’. In other words, there is nothing in political economy, whether Marxist or otherwise, which enables us to think an emancipatory political practice beyond interest; and in consequence Marxist politics have remained, along with liberal politics, overwhelmingly statist in their practice. The problems which Marxism faces are therefore not to be found so much in its structuralism, but in its failure to think of an egalitarian emancipatory political practice as an exceptional occurrence located within existing relations.

A similar point could be made with regard to the discipline of history (along with other social sciences), which tends to conflate the crucial understanding that it is people who make history with an ex post facto analysis that imposes a necessary, objective, causal pattern on time. Although both political economy and history are central to understanding the social world we live in, they are currently limited by their inability to provide an understanding of the unpredictable exceptions during which political subjectivities are able to exceed a reflection or representation of the social, simply because all humans are reasoning beings. Indeed, as currently constituted, these disciplines efface an understanding of politics precisely because that excessive reason is asocial and consequently remains unthinkable. It remains unthinkable because it is fully understandable only as a subjective upsurge in the present and not as a structured necessity ex post facto, after the owl of Minerva has flown, to paraphrase Hegel’s well-known metaphor. We can no longer, to use Jacques Rancière’s (2012) terms, understand this exception – the foundation of emancipatory thought – within a logic of causal necessity, but only as an unpredictable aleatory event.

According to Sylvain Lazarus (2013), such subjectivities can indeed be rationally studied, as people – anyone – can imagine alternative possibilities (he talks of ‘possibles’) when they think beyond the limits established by social place or identity. Of course, people do not always think ‘out of place’ or ‘out of order’. But when they do, they illuminate the present in a manner that cannot be thought by the categories deployed by historians and sociologists. There is no need to collapse into vulgar psychological or moralistic accounts to begin to think popular subjectivities independently of their social foundation; to do so is to naturalise them, whereas the point is to foreground the existence and necessity of political choices. The central concern, then, is to oppose a politics of activism and militancy to a politics of professional politicians and the state, a politics founded on principles to a politics founded on interests. It is only the former which can be called politics in the true sense, for it begins with an understanding of people – of all people without exception – as active thinking beings.

The object of this book is thus the understanding of political agency, specifically as conceived in two areas of thought: first, in analyses of emancipatory politics in African history and, second, in recovering the thought of emancipatory politics today – in other words, in making explicit some of the political conditions and categories for thinking political agency on the continent in the 21st century. The first is a methodological and historical project, the second a conceptual and epistemic one. They are held together by the central concern to ‘bring a politics of emancipation back into thought’ in the humanities and social sciences in Africa, from which it has been displaced for a considerable length of time. I should therefore stress at this stage that, although I am studying Africa, I do not begin from ‘culture’ or ‘identity’, which I see as core components of typically state discourses. Rather than starting from what seems to distinguish Africa, its cultural uniqueness, which determined its place in the Western imaginary – a position evidently rooted in Enlightenment thought and central to colonial taxonomy – this book begins from the subversion of place, from how African people themselves thought emancipation when they rebelled, which is precisely what makes Africans fully part of humanity as a whole. All people are capable of thinking beyond their social place and immediate interests. Starting from culture merely forces a concentration on identity, ethnicity, authenticity, race, darkness, natives, ‘Africanity’, periphery, ‘coloniality’, and so on – on difference and not on universal humanity. Ultimately, it is allocation to social place that structures such an analysis. It then becomes easy to fall into a position in which, for example, Africans are simply victims of a history that has been made exclusively by others, in the West. Africans, like other human beings, must be thought of as agents of their history, not as its victims. What is universal is precisely the stepping out of place, a displacement which enables one to affirm one’s humanity independently of where one is situated by the Other, be it the state, culture or the colonial oppressor. As Kristin Ross (2009: 21) puts it, if one begins from place, ‘people’s voices, their subjectivities can be nothing more than the naturalized, homogenized expressions of those spaces’. We therefore need to be able to think how people act and think their displacement themselves; it is this which makes them part of universal humanity rather than of the animal world of interests.

I have put a conception of universal humanity at the forefront of my thinking here, as I believe Alain Badiou (2010b: 112) is right when he notes that ‘thought is worth nothing if it is not structured and ordered by the possibility of an emancipatory politics for the whole of humanity’. I have tried to be faithful to this idea throughout the writing of this book. It is up to the reader to decide whether this attempt has been successful. The core problem we face in thinking emancipation is that the social sciences as currently constituted unfortunately do not possess a universal conception of humanity, what Badiou (2013c: 14–21) calls a ‘generic set’; all they see are differences, not a true universality. When they do recognise universality, it is false, for it is simply generalised from the particularities of the dominant. Yet the answer to this distorted vision of universality inherent in liberalism today is not a cultural relativism, but rather the affirmation of a generic humanity, which happens to be precisely what the African slave rebels of Saint-Domingue in particular emphasised in their practice from 1791, as we shall see in some detail in chapter 2.

That the social sciences regard the majority of the world’s population as living in ‘subhuman’ conditions, from which they deduce the absence of a generic humanity as an empirically verifiable fact, merely leads to the idea that poor people – or the politically excluded more generally – cannot think, as the capacity to think and reason is arguably the essence of the human, at least if we adhere to a universality from which Enlightenment thinkers regularly excluded the majority of the world’s population. For social science, the excluded are said to simply react to their social location – to their interests or identity – and therefore to be ultimately bereft of reason. The currently fashionable insistence on deconstructing social identities, even at the level of philosophy, is only the latest version of this kind of thinking. The idea of colonial ‘epistemicide’ in the Global South, popularised by de Souza-Santos (2014), is fundamentally misleading because, even though Western colonialism did indeed systematically devalue and marginalise local knowledges and cosmologies, it could not fully destroy them; people have still been able to think their condition through them, including for the purposes of rebellion against colonialism and its various neo-colonial avatars. What is in fact being pointed to is the silencing of alternatives from within the liberal discourse of power, especially in the academy, but this does not imply that colonised people have been victims of ‘epistemicide’. Actually, one of the major intellectual figures of the struggle for freedom on the African continent had already observed in 1970 that ‘the freedom struggle of African peoples is both the fruit and the proof of cultural vigor, opening up new prospects for the development of culture in the service of progress’ (Cabral, 1973: 49). The academic tendency to merely produce a victimology when it comes to thinking Africa is extremely prevalent today.

We shall see throughout this book that African people – much like everybody else – have refused to be victims; they have at times been quite able to draw on their heritage of knowledge to contest, often successfully, colonial domination and thereby to create new knowledge in the process. As a result of their exclusive focus on thinking divisions, interests and identities, the social sciences have only rarely engaged in thinking universal emancipation, freedom, justice and human dignity. This is indeed why Marx’s thought was so exceptional, precisely because his was a thought of the universal emancipation of humanity combined with a theory of the social.

Contrary to most social science, Badiou’s philosophy is a genuine contemporary effort to conceive the universal. It shows that today the humanities are quite able to produce a more liberating orientation than the social sciences simply because they enable a concept of the universally human which is radically distinct from the liberal conception. Anyone who makes the kind of universal statements that Badiou consistently and courageously makes and is rigorously faithful to in his work – to the extent, rare in Europe, of understanding Western imperialism in its past and present manifestations – to my mind not only must be taken extremely seriously but is worthy of the utmost attention and intellectual respect. Not that this book is ‘about’ Badiou’s thought – it is not – rather, it is about Africans and the manner in which they have thought and currently think freedom. Yet, given that Badiou’s work is an attempt to rigorously theorise change through the deployment of a subjective exception, an exception both in history and in political practice, it seems to me to be an extraordinarily useful resource. That it may not refer to Africa directly is beside the point. It can be stretched or modified in order to make it more directly relevant, if necessary. But philosophers are not the only intellectuals. Ordinary people are in fact capable of thought beyond the habit of place – excessive thought – and show these capacities in often unpredictable sites. The intellectuals of Abahlali baseMjondolo, notwithstanding their recent controversial decision to vote en masse for a Right-wing party in South Africa, have also had an important influence on this book, as the reader will discover, not least because it is clear that they form part of those people who think.² This seemed to me to be particularly evident in their notion of ‘unfreedom’, used to denote relations between state and people that are not founded on citizenship rights. Several authors associated with the Subaltern Studies Collective in India have emphasised similar conceptions; they have insisted on identifying multiple domains of politics, although in somewhat different ways from the manner in which I do so here.

There will be much reference to French philosophy in this book, but exclusively to that philosophy which is concerned with the subversion of consensual state thinking, and which helps us to think ‘at a distance’ from the state and power. A number of thinkers will be relied on in this regard, including Jacques Rancière, Sylvain Lazarus, Frantz Fanon, Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee and others. These all help to provide us with the appropriate kinds of questions and perspectives, as well as with some of the concepts and categories, to begin to think human agency in its own terms rather than as reflective of social place or determined by power. As far as Badiou’s work is concerned, it is able (as with all advanced forms of thought) to incorporate previous conceptions into its system as valid in relation to specific (historically previous) conditions and not to dismiss these as false. These therefore become theoretically and historically relativised. In particular, this applies to orthodox 20th-century Marxism. The fact that such Marxism has reached its limit in thinking emancipation in world history should by now be apparent; its reliance on conceiving emancipation as an effect of attaining state power has shown itself to have failed. To continue to think in this manner, to see the state as the vehicle of emancipation, can only really be sustained today against all the evidence. The state cannot emancipate anyone.

Beginning from an idea of displacement does not mean that place will be of no concern, but rather that it is from the subversion of place, from a position outside place – from a position of universal equality which subverts place as such – rather than from place itself, that place can be fully understood. At the same time, this excess over place will be marked by its place in one way or another. In particular, this book holds that the inability to subvert place – in other words, to develop and grasp categories beyond place – is the main obstacle to thinking beyond state politics, for the state is the manager of places and their relations to one another within a social hierarchy and social relations. It is the inability to grasp the subversion of place within revolts, rebellions, riots and revolutions that lies at the core of the failure to understand the politics of emancipation, a procedure typical of the sociology of social movements, for example. When the oppressed refuse and resist oppression, they regularly place themselves beyond the place of oppression both subjectively and politically, and often also physically; by doing so they make oppression visible. This placing of oneself beyond place is in essence a purely subjective gesture, the result of a decision or refusal of the extant and an affirmation of something else. An understanding of this displacement has been effaced by social science and regularly relegated to the psychological or the utopian.

However, this book maintains that it is displacement in thought that constitutes the basis of agency and in particular the beginning of an emancipatory politics. But an emancipatory politics consists of much more than mere displacement; it consists in fact of a whole new mode of thinking politics based among the politically excluded and emphasising egalitarian principles within a prescriptive practice. Subjective excess often searches for historically prior experiences which can help it to understand that its thinking is truly legitimate and that it possesses a long heritage of popular emancipatory antecedents. This search for such historical antecedents is also linked to what might be termed an expressive–excessive dialectic. What I mean quite simply is that whereas academics may be able to detach themselves from a political practice, activists cannot fully avoid the contradictions between subjectivities as expressions of place and their excess: their ‘expressions of place’ because all rebellion is socially located, and ‘excessive thought’ because it sometimes consciously outstrips its location. It is only through gradually resolving these contradictions on a continuous basis that a process of politicisation and emancipation can be sustained.

Of course, none of this means that the state should be ignored, avoided or constantly opposed in constructing a thought of politics for the 21st century. Badiou’s is not an anarchist position: it does not suggest that power should never be taken under any circumstances; rather, it begins by thinking in such a way that the taking of state power becomes no longer central to the thought of politics but rather contingent. What this means is that the state must be rethought from within a perspective which does not privilege or even think within state categories, but which makes a conscious effort to think outside them, ‘at a subjective distance’ from them. In this manner, thought can be ordered by a fidelity to the idea of the emancipation of humanity, to which state politics cannot possibly be faithful. The insistence in this book on an analysis of singular events and processes of political subjectivation has also meant that the formation of political subjectivities can be analysed in all their complexity. In particular, what this has involved is the recognition that political excessive thought combines in contradictory ways with a thinking that is expressive of place, and, moreover, that there is not one but several distinct domains that differ fundamentally in their definition of subjectivities through which the state and people relate. This takes us to analysis beyond the limits of what is required by purely philosophical thought.

Finally, I must stress that my fundamental focus is on the opening up of new ways of thinking and on arguing for a return to theory. I am not so much concerned with prescribing a particular road to emancipation, although such prescription unavoidably does occur here and there. Yet prescription cannot be undertaken in the abstract anyway; it only makes sense within a specific context and singularity. I am conscious that I may have slipped occasionally and made my personal voice more vocal than it should perhaps be. It is difficult at times to distinguish between analysis and prescription. I therefore do not so much implore the reader to ignore this kind of mishap as recognise that this is merely a mark of enthusiasm and struggle, and that in any case I am not avoiding a commitment to an emancipatory idea that is necessary for rethinking theory and for transforming our lives.

Michael Neocosmos

Grahamstown

August 2015

NOTES

1.See http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/02/2015-human-development-report-to-focus-on-employment/, accessed 25/08/2015. At the other end of the scale, the London Guardian newspaper reported that in the same year one per cent of the world’s population owned half of its wealth. See http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/oct/13/half-world-wealth-in-hands-population-inequality-report, accessed 15/10/2015.

2.The historical narrative of this book ends in 2013. The ‘controversial decision’ referred to here was Abahlali’s call, after years of insisting on not voting at elections, on their members to vote for the Democratic Alliance (DA) during the May 2014 parliamentary elections in South Africa on the grounds that such a vote would help to remove the African National Congress (ANC) from municipal power. They have stressed that this decision was purely tactical. Given the democratic character of that organisation, it seems to me that their decision, whether one agrees with it or not, should be respected and that they should be allowed to make their own mistakes without being vilified by the self-appointed guardians of Left orthodoxy (see e.g. Mail & Guardian, 23–29 May 2014). See also e.g. Abahlali (2008). However this date clearly denotes the beginning a new sequence in Abahlali’s conception of politics. The use I make of Abahlali in this book is marked by their thinking prior to this date.