Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
mode and sequence came to an end.26 In addition to the two modes of politics already mentioned, Lazarus outlines at some length four others: the Revolutionary mode, the Dialectical mode, the Stalinist mode and the Parliamentary mode. The Revolutionary mode is associated with the experience of the French Revolution between the summer of 1792 and July 1794. Its main site was the Jacobin Convention and its main militants and theoreticians were Saint-Just and Robespierre, the co-authors of the 1793 constitution. Its conception of politics was one that proclaimed that ‘a people has only one dangerous enemy: its government’ (Saint-Just, 2004: 630, my translation) and that understood politics as a form of moral consciousness or ‘virtue’ to be combined with ‘terror’ against the revolution’s enemies (Robespierre, 2007). For Saint-Just (2004: 758, my translation), ‘it is leaders who must be disciplined because all evil results from the abuse of power’. Thus, ‘Saint-Just regularly proposes analyses and policies which, although they concern the state and the government, are thought outside of and are explicitly directed against a statist logic’ (Lazarus, 1996: 225ff, my translation).
The main theoretician of the Dialectical mode is Mao Zedong. According to him, history is subordinated to the masses, as its influence disappears behind subjective notions such as an ‘enthusiasm for socialism’. ‘For Mao, the masses do not make history, they are history’ (Lazarus, 2013: 131, my translation). Political consciousness develops in leaps and bounds and ‘there exists an exclusively political knowledge because such knowledge is dialectical without being historical. Even if the party exists it does not identify the mode of politics.’ The sites of this mode are those of the revolutionary war: the party, the army, the United Front; its limits extend from 1928 to 1958 (Lazarus, 1996: 91, my translation; see also Anon., 2005).
These modes of politics conceive of politics ‘internally’, in terms of their own specificity, without reference to what Lazarus calls ‘external invariants’. In fact, it was only in the Bolshevik mode that the party had a central role within subjectivity. In all cases there was a multiplicity of sites, and a political distance from the state was maintained. Any emancipatory consciousness is purely political and exists under the conditions of an excess over spontaneous forms of consciousness, which are generally expressive of existing social relations and hierarchies. In addition, two modes of politics are identified by Lazarus, each of which focuses political subjectivity on an ‘external invariant’, namely the state. These are the Parliamentary mode and the Stalinist mode; both of these have been dominant in 20th-century world history, according to Lazarus. For both these modes, political subjectivity is subordinated to a state subjectivity. The principle of parliamentary politics is not that ‘people think’ but rather that ‘people have opinions regarding government’ (Lazarus, 1996: 93, my translation). ‘The so-called “political” parties of the parliamentary mode, far from representing the diversity of opinions, are the subjective organisers of the fact that the only thought deemed possible is an opinion regarding the government’ (p. 93).
It follows that parties are not so much political organisations as state organisations, which end up distributing state positions among members of the elite. Thus, for the Parliamentary mode there is only one recognised site of politics and that is the state. Similar functions are fulfilled in this mode by trade unions, which are also very much state organisations. The essential political act of parliamentarianism is voting, as the institutional articulation between the subjective side of opinion and the objective character of government. Voting does not so much serve to represent opinions as to produce a majority of professional politicians who are provided by parties; ‘it transforms the plural subjectivity of opinions on government into a functioning unity’ founded on consensus (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1993: 117). The act of ‘voting transforms vague “programmes” or promises of parties into the authority of a consensus’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994: 249). In other words, voting amounts to a legitimising principle of the state consensus, and politics is ultimately reduced to a question of numbers.
The Stalinist mode of politics refers to a political subjectivity that existed not just in the Soviet Union, but also throughout the communist parties linked to the Third International. Politics is confined to the party and the party is understood to be the very embodiment of that consciousness. ‘As the party is presented as the source of all political truth’, the Stalinist mode ‘requires the credibility of the party’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994: 250). The one-party state is the only political datum provided to subjectivity and the only practical domain of that subjectivity. The only site of politics is the state-party. The sequence of this mode begins during the early 1930s and ends with Gorbachev’s accession to power (Lazarus, 1996: 94). Of course, other modes of politics can also be elucidated, and I shall have occasion to refer to some of these in the arguments that follow throughout this book. The point to stress in this context is that modes of politics ‘in externality’, as they are modes of state politics, can quite easily be found in continuity with each other: for example, a colonial and certain postcolonial forms of politics, while possibly of a different character, may be founded on similar subjectivities in some fundamental respects. We will see in a later chapter that it is possible to characterise state politics in Africa today as neo-colonial, founded in particular on the reality that the postcolonial state today considers the majority of its people as the enemy. The continuity of such state politics is made possible precisely by the fact that all state politics have common underlying elements, most obviously politics expressive of interests.
I will show in my discussion of Saint-Domingue/Haiti in chapter 2 that we can indeed speak of a unique mode of politics between 1791 and 1796, which is thought ‘in interiority’ and which by the latter date has become saturated. Thereafter, various forms of militarism become dominant, while subsequently ex-slaves think their freedom in terms of a politics that insists on their economic independence. A subjective as well as social distance from the state is established until its collapse through the systematic deployment of state violence in the 1960s. There is a discontinuity here between political subjectivities, whose character Lazarus’s categories can help us to elucidate in their own terms. What is clear in this particular example is the centrality of the slaves’ and subsequently the ex-slaves’ own practices and thinking – particularly of the bossales (those born in Africa) – in effectuating these subjectivities.
THE EVENT, THE POLITICAL SUBJECT AND THE PROCESS OF SUBJECTIVATION
Let me now briefly expand on some of the categories and concepts already mentioned from Badiou’s work, which will enable me to delineate the sequences I shall be discussing in this book with greater precision. As I have noted, the core concept in Badiou’s philosophy of change is that of the ‘event’. This is what ‘brings to pass “something other” than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledges; the event is a hazardous, unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears’ (Badiou, 2001: 67).
The event is both situated – it is the event of this or that situation – and supplementary; thus absolutely detached from, or unrelated to, all the rules of the situation ... You may then ask what it is that makes the connection between the event and that ‘for which’ it is an event. This connection is the void of the earlier situation. What does this mean? It means that at the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organised the plenitude (or the stable multiples) of the situation in question ... We may say that since a situation is composed of the knowledges circulating within it, the event names the void inasmuch as it names the not-known of the situation. To take a well-known example: Marx is an event for political thought because he designates, under the name ‘proletariat’, the central void of early bourgeois societies. For the proletariat – being entirely dispossessed, and absent from the political stage – is that around which is organized the complacent plenitude established by the rule of those who possess capital. To sum up: the fundamental ontological characteristic of an event is to inscribe, to name, the situated void of that for which it is an event (2001: 68–9).
An event names the void, the absence, what is considered simply impossible, that which is not conceivable from within the knowledges of the situation. Badiou puts it in this way: ‘It is that which is not there which is important. The appearing of that which is not there; this is the origin of every real