Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
of the faithful subject as its articulated unconscious. It does not propose to abolish the present, only to show that the faithful rupture (which it calls ‘violence’ or ‘terrorism’) is useless for engendering a moderate, that is to say extinguished, present (a present that it calls ‘modern’) ... Things stand differently for the obscure subject. That is because it is the present that is directly its unconscious, its lethal disturbance, while it disarticulates within appearance the formal data of fidelity ... [It entertains] everywhere and at all times the hatred of any living thought, of any transparent language and of every uncertain becoming (2009a: 61, cit. Power and Toscano, 2009: 29, translation modified).
In addition, Badiou makes the important point that whatever the seeming victory of reaction or obscurantism, a subject can be reactivated ‘in another logic of its appearing-in-truth’; this he calls a ‘resurrection’ (2009a: 65). The example he gives is instructive. He refers to the ‘resurrection’ of the slave rebellion led by Spartacus in 73–71 BC, first by Toussaint Louverture in Saint-Domingue, who was referred to as the ‘Black Spartacus’ by General Laveaux in 1796, and second in 1919 by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who called themselves ‘Spartakists’. He concludes: ‘the subject whose name is “Spartacus” travels from world to world through the centuries. Ancient Spartacus, Black Spartacus, Red Spartacus’ (p. 65). In this way a new event, a new trace and a new body are generated, and previously occluded events are extracted from their occlusion, are remembered and recaptured politically.31 Finally, Badiou notes that ‘the turnstile of the three subjective types defines a sequence of history’ (2009b: 111), meaning that the manner in which these three subjects interrelate may enable us to delimit a sequence32 and help us to know its truth:
One must start patiently from events and from the construction of the truths which follow. Then accept that reaction and its extreme forms are also novelties which are contemporary to the post-evental present which signals the existence of the subjectivatable body. And finally hold that the confused appearance of history results from the fact that the mix of subjective orientations cannot be calculated from its result. Because one will know the True only in so far as it will arrive at the eternity of which it is capable, via its successive ups and downs as it confronts reactionary and obscure novelties. Therefore, one will know it – in the sense of what is really meant by knowing – when detached from its present, and hence from the confused world which saw its birth. It is only when it is arranged in another world in order for it to be used to new ends of incorporation that its resurrection will deliver it as it stands. A truth is only universal in the future anterior of the bodily process which makes it appear (Badiou 2009b: 113, my translation).
As I shall show in this book, reactive and obscure subjectivities do not recognise politics as an affirmation. They always reduce political subjectivity to a social foundation and thus, at best, conflate it with the political and, at worst, see within it only the pathological, so that a sequence cannot be thought at all, with the result that the period becomes illegible. Politics as affirmation, as thought, as ‘excess’, cannot be grasped as representation, as it is always (at least partly) excessive of the social; yet, in the concrete conditions of its unique singularity, it is simultaneously related to the social in some way, simply because excess is always internal to the situation of that which it exceeds.33 It is at this point that empirical investigation is important in order to elucidate the unique specifics of this relation. By recognising this complex excessive–expressive dialectic, one can begin to try to show how major transformations by Africans were affirmed so that they are just not understandable as simple expressions of the social location of their participants, either through a vulgar state perspective, or through a more sophisticated history or social science (e.g. a ‘sociology of social movements’) which has insisted on visualising the subjective as a ‘reflection’ or ‘representation’ of the objectively social.
Incidentally, it should be noted that it is this quality of social science which lies at the foundation of its common Eurocentrism, governed as it is by a scientistic episteme. I shall have occasion to return to this point below, but it is important to note at this stage that, given that the social sciences as presently constituted do not have the capacity to comprehend affirmative subjectivities, they are perforce not able to recognise African subjective affirmations; as a result, the Third World subaltern is unable to be heard through their medium (Saïd, 1995; Spivak, 1988; Lalu, 2009). These disciplines can only refer such affirmations to social categories that have tended to be ultimately European in their referents, or even reduce them on occasion to psychological aberrations or social pathologies, evident in colonial literature and characteristic of reactive and obscure subjectivities. The difficulties which the discipline of anthropology in particular has faced historically in this regard are well known, as are its colonial roots, yet the problem is arguably one which extends beyond anthropology and which has fundamentally epistemic roots (Foucault, 1980). It is such Eurocentrism, endemic to what might be called ‘epistemic reason’, which is arguably to be found at the core of both a reactive and an obscure state subjectivity.
In order to fill the obvious lacuna created by the absence of the subjectivity of politics, the social sciences have made ubiquitous empty gestural references to the importance of considering agency, along with having recourse to (social) psychological accounts, all of which have had necessary depoliticising effects.34 In a very important essay, Hannah Arendt (2006) has argued that – in the Western philosophical tradition – this depoliticisation of politics, the result of equating freedom with individual will and hence of seeing it as an issue of psychology, was first put forward through the divorcing of freedom from agency and its attachment to simple consciousness. The main thinker in this regard was Saint Augustine, who substituted the Christian ‘free interiority’ of the individual for the classical Greek understanding of freedom as human agency, a view which has persisted into democratic liberalism today.35 In this view, an individual can be totally politically passive and apathetic and still be an agent exercising her ‘freedom’, as freedom is considered a matter of individual will. The similarity with the idea of ‘market freedom’, in which the subject is said to exercise her freedom by being a passive consumer, should be clear. One must therefore first detach agency from its idealist underpinnings and then follow Badiou in thinking the subject as the bearer of excess. As a result, the idea of the subject must be de-psychologised in order to provide a materialist analysis of subjectivity; this can be done, it seems to me, by adhering to both Badiou’s and Lazarus’s theoretical innovations, which see subjects as the bearers of excessive subjectivities and not as given by their simple biological existence and (social) consciousness. In sum, the point is to recognise that politics exists beyond identity, that it must not be conflated with the political, and that therefore, if it is to be the object of rigorous thought, it cannot be reduced to the psychology of individuals, to consciousness, to power or to the state. An emancipatory politics, in particular, consists fundamentally of an affirmative subjectivity which is both singular and universal in nature, while other qualitatively different subjectivities are usually formed in reaction to it.
In outlining the categories which Lazarus and Badiou use to understand politics, my objective has been to lay the foundation for an analysis of political subjectivities deployed by Africans, particularly emancipatory politics, wherever they are to be found on the African continent. In order to do this, it should be clear that we need to be able to assess politics as pure affirmation and to demarcate it from state and (neo-) colonial subjectivities; these are always reduced to social categories with the result that politics is understood as being located within a social matrix, and political consciousness as simply epiphenomenal. In this view, politics is overwhelmingly grasped as ‘representing’ class, nation, ethnicity and any number of social entities, and in consequence all politics is seen in one way or another as identity politics. The reactive subject in Africa, founded precisely on a representative conception of subjectivity, can be most obviously recognised in the politics of the first phase of the postcolonial or nationalist state (1955–79), while the obscure subject has generally been, and is still, located within (neo-)colonial or apartheid-type political subjectivities.
There are three major historical sequences which frame the discussion in Part 1. The first is the struggle for emancipation from slavery in Saint-Domingue in the 18th century, followed