Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
closes the discussion of politics in history through an argument that suggests that Abahlali baseMjondolo are currently thinking in excess of state politics, in fidelity to the event of the 1980s.
NOTES
1.In other words, at a minimum, politics only exists when the oppressed move beyond ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott, 1990) and explicitly engage in a collective practice of changing the world.
2.The original says: ‘Il faut entendre par empirisme l’idée qu’on doit tout fonder sur une passivité primordiale qui est comme une cumulation des effets de l’extérieur’ (Badiou, 2013f, 14 November 2012).
3.What the French call ‘un garde fou’; in other words, in this case a limit to intellectual escapism.
4.The politics of resistance to colonialism have at times taken extreme forms of collective self-immolation. A well-known example here is the destruction of their cattle herds by the amaXhosa in 1856–7 as a result of a prophecy by a young woman, Nongqawuse. The so-called cattle-killing movement has been read as a form of resistance of a ‘millenarian’ type and hence as in some way ‘excessive’. See Peires (1989) and Bradford (1996), for example. It should be stressed that, in the manner in which I use the concept here, this episode, although extreme by any standards, cannot be understood as excessive, as it did not hold to a universal conception of equality; to use the categories of political resistance for such a self-destructive episode seems incongruous in the extreme. This is not to deny that millenarian movements could have powerful anti-colonial appeal; see Bradford (2007). Millenarian movements have, of course, been understood as socially located.
5.See, in this context, the debates in both Africa and India surrounding the limits of colonialism, in particular in Ajayi (1969) and Chatterjee (1993). I am grateful to Jeremiah Orowosegbe for reminding me of these.
6.As in the following statement: ‘The [African] continent seems to be administered more and more from outside without any of the sources of its instability such as the iniquity and violence of global relations ever being questioned’ (Le Monde diplomatique, no. 671, February 2010, p. 21, my translation).
7.‘This profound breach in the expanse of continuities, though it must be analysed, and minutely so, cannot be “explained” or even summed up in a single word. It is a radical event that is distributed across the entire visible surface of knowledge’ (Foucault, 2003a: 236).
8.‘The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea’ (Hegel, 1952: 80). Hegel is absolutely correct to note that continuity in history can only be an indication of a state subjectivity (e.g. development, progress, modernisation, etc.).
9.Following the work of Moses Finley on Ancient Greece (e.g. 1985); see Neocosmos (2009a).
10.Of course, many other struggles, particularly anti-slavery and anti-colonial struggles, have taken place; the ones which come particularly to mind are those of national (ethnic) and religious inspiration which occurred between the 1880s and 1920s in Africa, but these will not be considered here, primarily due to limits of space.
11.James Scott’s (1990) very important book, which deals with what he calls ‘hidden’ and ‘public transcripts’ of popular politics, while drawing attention to an important feature of subaltern thinking, equates all forms of subjective resistance with politics. There is no attempt to think when resistance is political and when it is not, and he does not recognise a concept of subjective excess or one of subjectivation. Contrary to this perspective, it will be argued at length here that not all forms of resistance are political (in the sense of possessing an emancipatory content), as resistance is a constant feature of oppressive power relations and may be manifested in all sorts of political subjectivities, some of which may be precisely reactionary.
12.See Mamdani (1990). The entrance of terms such as ‘governance’, ‘civil society’ and ‘human rights’ unquestioningly into our daily discourse is only a small example of such ideological dominance today.
13.Wallerstein (1995), for example, shows that both conservative and socialist strategies in 19th-century Europe gradually came close, from different starting points, ‘to the liberal notion of ongoing, [state-] managed, rational normal change’ (p. 96). He also notes that between 1848 and 1914, ‘the practitioners of all three ideologies turned from a theoretical anti-state position to one of seeking to strengthen and reinforce in practice the state structures in multiple ways’. Later, conservatives were transformed into liberal-conservatives, while Leninists were transformed into liberal-socialists; he argues that the first break in the liberal consensus at the global level occurred in 1968 (pp. 97, 103).
14.Perhaps the most obvious example was Margaret Thatcher’s injunction in the 1980s that ‘There is no alternative’ to neo-liberalism, a slogan often repeated in the 1990s in South Africa by the African National Congress (ANC).
15.In his latest work, Badiou suggests that ‘in the world as it exists today there is no positive usage of identitarian categories’ (Badiou, 2014a, 6 November 2013, my translation).
16.Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba (pers. comm., 22/01/2007).
17.Lazarus refers in particular to an essay called ‘Myth, Memory and History’ in Finley (1975).
18.The idea of ‘invention’ here is similar to the one used by Ranger, Vail and others in the notion of the ‘invention’ of tradition or ethnicity; i.e. it refers to a subjectivity that is being thought for the first time. The difference with Ranger’s notion consists primarily in the fact that Ranger’s understanding of ‘ethnic politics’ is a state politics, what could be named the ‘communitarian mode of politics’, which is a mode that fuses state and culture. See Ranger (1985b, 1993) and Vail (1989). For Moses Finley, the political subjectivity of the Greeks is thought separately from the state. According to Finley, it was precisely this ‘sense of community’ founded on active citizenship which was the idea at the core of Athenian democracy: ‘it was that sense of community ... fortified by the state religion, by their myths and their traditions, which was an essential element in the pragmatic success of the Athenian democracy’ (1985: 29).
19.One is tempted to see ‘the invisible hand of the market’ as one such contemporary myth.
20.Following Lacanian categories, politics is real, history is imagined and, for Badiou, the idea of communism is the symbolic link between the two; see Badiou (2011e: 13).
21.Moreover, as I shall have occasion to note in chapter 7, for Lenin a proletariat was not simply given in early 20th-century Russia, either socio-economically or especially politically; it had to ‘demarcate’ itself from other classes. Socio-economically, in an overwhelmingly peasant country, it had to demarcate itself from classes emanating from a disintegrating peasantry; politically, it demarcated itself from other classes precisely by developing ‘its’ own political positions on the issues of the day through the medium of ‘its’ (social-democratic) party.
22.For such an outline, see Lazarus (1996: 136–52).
23.See Foucault (1968, 1980, 2003a).
24.Lenin’s writings during this period have recently been collected and edited by Slavoj Žižek; see Lenin (2002).
25.I have shown elsewhere at length how such a process of depoliticisation unfolded in South Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s; see Neocosmos (1998). I shall have occasion to return to this argument in later chapters.
26.For a detailed history of the soviets in Russia and their disappearance, see Anweiler (1972).
27.For Badiou, the immanent exception in politics is the ‘idea of communism’. For him, communism is a political subjectivity which always contains elements of anti-statism and egalitarianism; more broadly, it consists of a politics which is both particular and localised and is also addressed universally (Badiou, 2011e: 11).
28.An idea, such as that of the event, which denotes the always located hazardous unpredictable is not unique to Badiou; for example, the idea of the ‘clinamen’, derived from the work of the early materialists (Lucretius, Democritus, Epicurus) and