Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
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