Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
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