Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
as a result of repression.
33.Lindela is the detention centre outside Johannesburg where migrants to South Africa are kept before repatriation.
34.One of the few major intellectuals in Africa to retain such a confidence in the masses is Wamba-dia-Wamba; his written work has not been produced within academia and largely takes the form of political interventions in various singular contexts.
35.See his interview with Lawrence Liang in Kafila: http://kafila.org/2009/02/12/interview-with-jacques-ranciere/.
36.It should also be recalled that, simultaneously with the Paris Commune, the people of Kabylia in Algeria rebelled against French colonialism. The Cheikh Moqrani Uprising of 1871–2 was put down with equal, if not greater, ferocity than that used against the revolutionaries in Paris, while rebels from both Paris and Kabylia were often sent on the same ships in exile to New Caledonia. In fact, the Third Republic, which followed after the defeat of the Commune, opened up a major sequence of extremely violent colonial expansion by the French state. The uprising in Kabylia has generally been occluded by the Left in France. For attempts to redress the balance, see Liauzu (2010) and Blanchard et al. (2005).
37.Not as a ‘thought in practice’, a formulation which would fall into the abstract–concrete distinction; the point being that thought and practice are inseparable in politics. Lazarus (1996: 113) formulates this point as ‘politics is a thought-relation-of-the-real’, as opposed to history, which is a ‘thought-relation-of-the-state’, and philosophy, which is a ‘thought-relation-of-thought’.
38.Incidentally, if it were thought necessary, textual support for the centrality of a notion of practice can also be found in Marx’s own work. It is simply that the 1859 Preface has come to be the core ‘historical materialist’ reference for vulgar Marxism. See the following well-known statement from the third, thesis on Feuerbach for example: ‘The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice’ (Marx, 1845: 29, emphasis in original). It should be recalled further that the third, thesis is concerned with a critique of vulgar materialism, which ‘arrives at dividing society into two parts of which one is superior to the other’ (p. 28).
39.By the ‘in-existent’, Badiou means those who do not exist or who only minimally exist within a particular world – for example the proletariat for Marx in 19th-century Europe. The concept is similar to the ‘zone of non-being’ in Fanon’s work, which arguably refers to existence (‘being there’) rather than to being qua being in the ontological sense. For both, it is among these people that emancipatory politics is likely to be found when it exists. For a brief definition of this term in Badiou’s philosophy, which is not restricted to politics, see Badiou (2009a: 587).
40.My translation. The original reads: ‘Le monde vous pouvez le surpasser, mais vous le surpassez de l’intérieur de ce monde, les procédures que vous inventez empruntent nécessairement, qu’elles le veuillent ou non, au définissable ambiant.’ See Badiou (2016, 15 February 2016).
PART 1
THINKING POLITICAL SEQUENCES: FROM AFRICAN HISTORY TO AFRICAN HISTORICAL POLITICAL SEQUENCES
Perhaps we should say today that, insofar as politics is concerned, the real will only be discovered by renouncing the historicist fiction – in other words, the fiction that History is on our side.
– Alain Badiou, À la recherché du réel perdu, 2015 (my translation)
An event is the sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of myriad new possibilities, none of which is a repetition of the already known. This is why it is obscurantist to say ‘this movement demands democracy’ (meaning the kind we enjoy in the West) or ‘this movement demands social improvement’ (meaning the middle prosperity of our petty bourgeoisie). Beginning from practically nothing, resonating everywhere, this popular upsurge creates unknown possibilities for the entire world.
– Alain Badiou, Le Réveil de l’histoire, 2011 (my translation)
Does history begin only from the moment of the launching of the phenomenon of class, and consequently class struggle? To reply in the affirmative would be ... to consider – and this we refuse to accept – that various human groups in Asia, Africa and Latin America were living without history or outside history at the moment when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism.
– Amílcar Cabral, Presuppositions and objectives of national liberation in relation to social structure, 1966 (Unity and Struggle, 1980, emphasis in original)
The people and the people alone are the makers of universal history.
– Alain Badiou, Le Réveil de l’histoire, 2011 (my translation)
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