Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
that slaves could be fully human, that they could reason, organise and be victorious over the armies of the imperial powers of the time. The slaves’ affirmation that they were human was precisely a subjective power that indicated the void of Enlightenment thought, according to which only some people were fully human. Today it is impossible to conceive an emancipatory politics from within the subjective parameters of liberalism and state democracy, a politics of ethnic equality is inconceivable from within a politics of ethnic genocide, and so on. The event is something that is both located within the extant and that points to alternatives to what exists, to the possibility of something different. It is thus a singularity before it may become a universal or eternal truth – ‘an immanent exception in the world where it arises’ (Badiou, 2013f) – with the result that ‘truth is the absolute condition of freedom’ (Badiou, 2014a).27 In Žižek’s somewhat Hegelian but easily recognisable formulation:
The authentic moment of discovery, the breakthrough, occurs when a properly universal dimension explodes from within a particular context and becomes ‘for-itself’, and is directly experienced as universal. The universality-for-itself is not simply external to or above its particular context: it is inscribed within it. It perturbs and affects it from within, so that the identity of the particular is split into its particular and universal aspects (Žižek, 2008: 129, emphasis in original).
In politics today, and in Africa in particular, which is what concerns us here, a political event would be expected to point us – from within the situation or world itself – towards a different way of engaging in and thinking about politics, beyond the one-way thinking of neo-liberalism and its form of democracy. For outside hegemonic political liberalism today, all that exists is a void; in other words, alternative modes of politics are considered to be impossible, utopian, impracticable. When events happen, they force us, for a while at least, to think of the situation differently. Popular upsurges, however brief, if they are indeed powerful enough, force new issues onto the agenda; for example, they enable changes in thought in the ‘public sphere’. In Badiou’s more recent work (e.g. Badiou, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c), a complex theory is developed in which the event is understood as a specific form of becoming that inaugurates real change (he calls this a ‘site’) with maximum existence (which he calls a ‘singularity’) and with maximal consequences. A singularity with non-maximal consequences he calls a ‘weak singularity’, while sites with non-maximal existence he simply calls ‘facts’. ‘Modifications’ are those forms of becoming without real change (Badiou, 2009a: 363–80). In the same work, Badiou now speaks of ‘worlds’ rather than ‘situations’ as he did earlier: ‘There is no stronger transcendental consequence than the one which makes what did not exist in a world appear within it’ (Badiou, 2009a: 376). The popular struggles in different parts of Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, a period that was optimistically referred to as the ‘second liberation’ of the continent, forced new issues onto the agenda for a while, before these were again pushed into the background as state politics re-established itself (see Ake, 1996). Apart from the specific case of South Africa from 1984 to 1986, most of these changes were arguably simply facts or weak singularities, such as the ‘Marikana moment’ in South Africa in August 2012, which I discuss in detail in a later chapter.28
The other major concept of Badiou’s philosophy is the subject. For Badiou, the subject is the ‘active ... bearer of [a] dialectical overcoming ... Borne by an active intraworldly body, a subject prescribes the effects of this body and their consequences by introducing a cut and a tension into the organisation of places’ (2009a: 45). The political subject thus contests social places. A subject is not to be conflated with an individual – ‘an individual is not a subject “spontaneously”’ (Badiou, 2011e: 12, my translation) – in politics a subject is, in fact, always collective. A political subject is thus much more than a mere bearer of agency; it is a collective body made up of individuals who have ‘decided to become part of a political truth procedure; to become in short ... militant[s] of this truth’ (Badiou, 2009c: 184, my translation). Such an individual is ‘an active part of this new subject’ (p. 185). The political subject is both active and ‘excessive’ (or ‘prescriptive’) in the sense that it exceeds in thought and practice the complexity of the given extant of social relations, ideologies, places, hierarchies, divisions of labour, etc. For example, the slaves of Saint-Domingue formed themselves into a political subject by affirming their humanity collectively. Badiou continues by arguing that a subject is formed in particular through fidelity to an event and that this fidelity gives rise to a truth which is universal (or eternal). A truth is thus produced and not discovered; a subject is also produced as a result of a process. Moreover, a truth procedure is that process which produces a real change in a particular world. It should also be noted in passing that for Badiou there are four truth procedures (politics, science, love and art), but here I am only concerned with politics. This process of political subjectivation (or subjectification or subjectivisation) must therefore be studied rationally, as its characteristics cannot be known in advance, for these are not expressive; we are no longer within the perspective of a (class, national, ethnic) consciousness produced by a party of intellectuals according to pre-given theory.
Finally, a singularity that may give rise to a universal and eternal truth is always specifically located and is in excess of what exists in that location; in other words, it must cut across – interrupt in a singular manner – the specifics of a particular situation or world in order to give rise to a universal. In sum, for Badiou, subjects are not the result of state interpellations or discourses of power. It is not a Foucauldian analysis which is of relevance here; subjects exist only in so far as these retain a fidelity to the consequences of an event (past or present) which makes possible the excess over the extant; they become the subject of a truth of this event. It is thus the sustainment of a politics of excess which produces subjects; this cannot be thought of as an ‘automatic process’ but only as one of conscious becoming.29 Badiou has recently argued that the new subjects produced by an event in a world are of different kinds and are not limited to the faithful subject. He now recognises that an event also creates new forms of subjects through reaction and obscurantism. In so far as political subjects are concerned:
The world exposes a variant of the gap between the state and the affirmative capacity of the mass of people ... A body comes to be constructed under the injunction of [the evental trace] which always takes the form of an organisation. Articulated point by point, the subjectivated body permits the production of a present which we can call, to borrow a concept from Sylvain Lazarus, a ‘historical mode of politics’. Empirically speaking this is a political sequence (73–71 BC for Spartacus, 1905–17 for Bolshevism, 1792–94 for the Jacobins, 1965–68 for the Cultural Revolution in China ...). The reactive subject carries the reactionary inventions of the sequence (the new form of resistance to the new) into the heart of the people [le peuple] or of people in general [les gens]. For a long time this has taken the form of reaction. The names of reaction are sometimes typical of the sequence, for instance ‘Thermidorian’ for the French Revolution, or ‘Modern Revisionists’ for the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The obscure subject engineers the destruction of the body: the appropriate word is fascism, but in a broader sense than the fascism of the thirties. One will speak of generic fascism to describe the destruction of the organised body through which the construction of the present (of the sequence) had previously passed (Badiou, 2009a: 72, translation modified).30
Here Badiou refers us back to Lazarus’s categories for the analysis of politics as a sequential subjectivity. In addition, in this argument, the faithful subject, the reactive subject and the obscure subject are all contemporary to the excessive novelty to which they react. The roles of these three subjects may be said to be as follows:
As the militant orientation of its own becoming, the faithful subject weaves the present of the body as a new time of truth. The reactive subject is all which orients the conservation of previous economic and political forms (capitalism and parliamentary democracy) in the conditions of existence of the new body ... The obscure subject wants the death of the new body (Badiou, 2009b: 107–8, 109, emphasis in original).
Badiou develops the distinction between the reactive and obscure subjects at some length:
It is crucial to gauge the gap between