are, in other words, capable of reason, of thinking beyond their social location and conditions, of thinking an excess beyond the simply given extant of the social division of labour and its corresponding social identities. Politics as thought in practice – emancipatory politics – must thus exist in excess of social relations and of social identities; otherwise, any change from the existing matrix of social relations and power cannot possibly be the object of thought, and people are not considered to be beings who reason; it cannot therefore be understood as a ‘reflection’ or ‘representation’ of existing socio-economic groupings and their hierarchies. Without this ‘excessive’ character, politics is simply conflated with ‘the political’, with party, the state and political community. This has been the core problem of previous attempts to understand emancipation in Africa and national emancipatory politics in particular. At the same time, it must be noted that excess is always excess over something, namely the extant, with the result that there is always a relationship between the thought of what is and the thought of what could be. The ‘excessive’ and the ‘expressive’ are always related in some dialectical way in political subjectivity, and it is the dialectical relation between the two which provides the thread of this book. Badiou (2016) puts it as follows: ‘you can indeed exceed the world but you can only do so from within. The procedures you invent must necessarily borrow from surrounding conceptions willingly or not.’40 Finally, it should also be stressed that the idea of ‘excess’ must not be understood in any simple ‘additive’ sense, for it may overturn the thought of the extant completely, or ‘puncture a hole in it’; yet such a politics of separation is sufficiently linked to the extant, to identities, interests and the state, for it ultimately to be, arguably, the most appropriate term available. Therefore, the objective and the subjective must not be thought of as related exclusively in an expressive manner, with the latter at most reacting back onto the former. They may be so related ‘normally’ or ‘habitually’, within what Badiou (1988) refers to as ‘the state of the situation’ and within society itself, although even in this case the expressive may take the form of specific idioms and discourses themselves not immediately reducible to social place, as we shall see in later chapters. But an emancipatory subjectivity can only find its roots within a relation of excess, wherein the expression of the objective is transcended or ‘punctured’ in many different ways, depending on circumstances. The excessive–expressive dialectic is thus what structures the thought of emancipation.
This book is concerned with opening up and discussing this excessive subjectivity – this thought in the strict sense, for expressive subjectivity is not thought, but mere expression of interest – justifying its existence, outlining some of the categories necessary for it to begin to be apprehended in thought, and identifying the way it is still marked by and linked to expression and representation. The book’s concern is to ‘bring politics back in’ – to paraphrase a hackneyed slogan – in view of the fact that politics understood as consciousness, ideologies, choices – in other words, as subjectivities – has been systematically evacuated from thought in the social or human sciences, primarily and fundamentally because of the equation of politics with the state along with the ‘epistemic reason’ governing these forms of knowledge acquisition. As a result, to paraphrase Spivak’s (1988) famous point, ‘the subaltern cannot be heard’ from within the parameters of this scientistic epistemic discourse. This is not because of any conscious distortion, but because of the ways in which a social or human science thinks subjectivity: exclusively as a ‘reflection’ or ‘representation’ of the social and, more precisely, of the entities of the social division of labour and hierarchy. As we shall see, such thinking amounts to a statist mode of thought, for it is the state which is concerned to manage and regulate such divisions, differences and identities; this mode of thought simply concerns how society is and cannot possibly think how it could be. It cannot think an alternative prescriptively, but only the extant descriptively or analytically and the tendencies derived from them. It therefore cannot think a possible future in the present, because it cannot think a universal Idea of freedom and equality as excessive, for such an Idea is purely and irreducibly subjective.
This book is divided into two parts. The first is concerned with thinking the history of political subjectivities through the use of what I have referred to as historical sequences of politics. The second deals explicitly with specific categories of African politics, such as class, nation, state, civil society, culture and tradition, rethinking these from the point of people rather than from the point of the state; in other words, as both excessive and expressive subjectivities deployed in various African contexts. The first part of the book consists of a debate with the discipline of history and with historians through an attempt to show that an excessive politics can be identified in popular struggles of the past, but that this excessive subjectivity is limited in time. The second part consists of a debate with sociology and, more precisely, with a view of politics reduced to the social: here an understanding of state categories from the point of popular experience is proposed. In either part alternatives are suggested in order to overcome the conceptual and political limitations of these perspectives as currently constituted. Given that emancipatory politics are rare and limited in time, it is possible to identify them with a certain degree of precision and to elucidate their rise and fall. It is through such a methodology that Lazarus (1996) identifies sequential historical modes of politics. Such subjective sequences are discontinuous, while what usually counts as historical ‘periodisation’ refers to continuous but objectively distinct sequences of state politics. The first part of the book thus consists of the development of a methodology for the identification and analysis of such sequences – in particular, emancipatory ones – in the history of Africans; the second outlines the consequences of this methodology for thinking politics today: both the socially reducible politics of the state and the identification of possible emancipatory subjectivities in the present and how they relate dialectically with the social.
NOTES
1.The only significant theorist to have drawn a parallel between South Africa and North Africa I know of was Mahmood Mamdani in Pambazuka News; see Mamdani (2011b).
2.This denial of history in Africa by Hegel took the following forms. After enunciating all sorts of fanciful accounts (mainly from travellers) regarding Africans, including cannibalism, Hegel maintains that the ‘Negro ... exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state ... there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character’ (1952: 196, 197). He concludes: ‘Africa ... is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit ... What we properly understand by Africa is the unhistorical undeveloped spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which has to be presented ... only as on the threshold of the world’s history’ (p. 199). His comments are based on the crudest racist prejudices of his times (1820s–1830s). Interestingly, Hegel dismisses Africa in a section entitled ‘Geographical Basis of History’, where he sees geographical location (place) as fundamental to the growth of ‘spirit’. This argument is thus one of the most important formal assertions of the location of subjectivity in place. He maintains that Africa’s natural state is a consequence of its ‘isolated character [and] originates ... in its geographical condition’ (p. 196); he also states that native Americans ‘gradually vanished at the breath of European activity’ and were ‘passionless’ and of a ‘crouching submissiveness ... towards a European’ (p. 190), while mentioning that they were treated with violence although not by any means illegitimately, it seems. It appears that, for Hegel, the accounts by travellers he used came in handy for his exposition, as they enabled him to illustrate what his time saw as a fanciful ‘natural condition’, which was ‘one of absolute and thorough injustice’ (p. 199). It would have been extremely useful for him to show that the ‘history of spirit’ could obviously not germinate in such peoples and therefore that a ‘civilising mission’ was clearly legitimate. He notes, for example, when he refers to Egypt that ‘this part ... must be attached to Europe; the French have lately made a successful effort in this direction’ (p. 196, emphasis in original). The reference is to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt; if that part of Africa was to be beneficially colonised by Europe, how much more could this be said to apply to the rest of the continent. Hegel was not only a ‘man of his times’ but thought like the European racist
