Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
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In this context it is crucial to insist on the fact that political subjectivities can be analysed, explained and understood rationally as much as any objective factor can be, and that this can be done without any collapse into idealism. We must therefore have the courage to move beyond Marx’s statement in his famous 1859 Preface and to assert that the ‘ideological forms in which men become conscious of this [class] conflict and fight it out’ can indeed be explained rationally without reducing them to ‘the existing conflict between social productive forces and the relations of production’ (1859: 182). In fact, Badiou shows quite clearly that subjectivity itself is part of the real, and not expressive of it in a distinct domain; it is this that allows for a rational investigation of political subjectivities. As a result, Badiou argues, the core concept in an analysis of politics must be that of ‘practice’; politics therefore must be understood as a ‘thought-practice’.37 It is this that makes it real:
I do not think it pertinent to oppose idealism to materialism on the basis of the distinction between thought and the real (primacy of the first over the second for idealism, and the opposite for materialism). Because this very common conception misunderstands the fundamental (materialist) point that thought is part of the real. To define materialism in terms of the primacy of the real over thought is already to have taken an idealist position ... Materialist, dialectical thought (dialectical materialism) itself begins with the notion of practice. What does ‘practice’ mean? For me it means that the finitude of objective conditions allows for the development of an immanent exception (Badiou, 2012c, 24 October, 14 November 2012, my translation, emphasis in original).38
For Rancière also, it is from the practical exception that one must begin if one wishes to understand political subjectivities, for it is such exceptions which show that people speak for themselves – contrary to much social science, which sees itself as speaking for people who do not speak for themselves:
The normal is when people remain in their place and when it all continues as before. Nevertheless, everything of note in the history of humanity functions according to the principle that something happens, that people begin to speak ... If we are speaking of the ‘workers’ voice’, we speak from the perspective of people who speak. That seems to be a truism. Yet it is contrary to a certain scientific method which requires that when we speak of the voice of the people, we are speaking of those who do not speak ... the point essentially is to speak for those who do not speak. This is as much a strategy of top politicians as it is of historians or sociologists, to say that the voice which counts is the voice of those who do not speak (Rancière, 2012: 194, my translation).
IN CONCLUSION
In sum, ‘politics is thought’, ‘thought is real’ and ‘people think’ are the three fundamental axioms of this book. Today, in the 21st century, it is apparent that emancipatory politics are not necessarily constituted around class, although they invariably are constituted around the politically ‘in-existent’, in Badiou’s sense of the term (Badiou, 2011c).39 The social categories of the people, the poor, the youth (and, during certain periods, women), have equally provided the basis for the thought of emancipation; yet, however excessive that thought of politics may have been at times, in most instances emancipation has been thought in terms of access in one form or another to the state, a fact which has had the effect of reversing emancipatory gains. The reduction of emancipatory political subjectivity to class (and indeed to any other social location or identity) is today redundant because the thought of politics as expressive of social location is the foundation of state politics: it is the state which thinks location, hierarchy, interests and identities, as it must ensure their reproduction. For emancipation to be adequately thought, social reductionism must be replaced with an understanding of the politically subjective which, while in some way marked by the objectively social, recognises its excessive – and hence its irreducible – character. It is not just a matter of critiquing neo-liberalism, socialism or nationalism as such. Rather, an alternative vision of freedom must also be affirmed, and it is the old notions of emancipation and freedom that need to be critiqued. In order to do this we need new categories and concepts to propose as part of a new vision of freedom. It follows that without opening up political subjectivities – including those of freedom – to rigorous study, making them visible, recognising their existence as worthy of analysis, we will be stuck within the past ways of thinking freedom (liberalism, Marxism, nationalism), which could not move beyond state thinking.
The way forward intellectually must be to think emancipatory politics, to think subjectivities as such, not simply as expressive of the social, which amounts to state thinking, but by detaching them from their current anchor in identity politics in general and from (social) psychology or morality in particular. This is a complex enterprise, but part of it must consist in a rethinking of history beyond historicism and of politics beyond the state; not as determined ‘in the last instance’ by the social (economy, state, nation, etc.), a conception which is always founded on material interests, but to refashion Althusser’s insight that history has no subject. In this manner politics can also become thinkable outside the party form, for the party represented the subject of history in radical thought, being said to represent the working class, the masses, the people or the nation in the political sphere. Subjects – which, according to Badiou (2009a), are always collective subjects in politics – can therefore be rigorously understood as produced and not as given; they can in fact be conceived as produced through a politics, as the products of subjectivities (through a process of ‘subjectivation’) and not the other way round, thus avoiding a collapse into idealism.
As Lazarus (1996: 67ff) insists, the foundation statement for the thinking of politics today must be ‘people think’. The foundational axiom of the thought of emancipatory politics must be that people are capable of thinking a different ‘possible’ – in other words, ‘what could be’ – in the present: ‘to say “people think” is to say that they are capable, under a name, of prescribing a possible