Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
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