an Idea and the problematic character of democracy itself in its present form. See, in particular, the collective volume on democracy (Agamben et al., 2009) to which all contributors provide a critical input; this includes not only Badiou and Rancière but also Agamben, Nancy, Žižek and many others. In current French philosophical thought, democracy in fact refers to two radically different notions: to a form of state as well as to a practice of popular affirmation of egalitarian alternatives. The latter notion is that proposed in particular by Rancière. He argues that, strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as a democratic state, as ‘all states are oligarchies’ by their very nature (Rancière, 2005: 79). It is the fact of not distinguishing state liberal democracy from alternative conceptions which accounts for Mbembe’s position, as he had previously very eloquently critiqued the infamous neo-colonial speech by French president Nicolas Sarkozy on his official visit to Senegal on 26 July 2007. For the controversy surrounding Sarkozy’s speech as well as Mbembe’s rightfully indignant response, see Ndiaye (2008).
18.For which he was heavily criticised by his friend Fanon; see Fanon (1967: 194–5).
19.Here I mean ‘people’ (les gens, la gente, abantu) as opposed to ‘the people’ (le peuple, el pueblo, il popolo).
20.There is evidence that recently Mbembe’s thinking on Africa has been changing, as in his recent work (e.g. Mbembe, 2013) it is African intellectuals’ mimetic relationship to the West which is criticised. His commentary on Fanon has also led him to stress a process of becoming and the idea of ‘indifference to difference’ particularly in relation to race and racism, although this is understood as a future ideal to be attained rather than a current practice.
21.References are too numerous to cite here. It will suffice to note the scholarly work on social movements emanating from the democratic struggles of the 1980s on the continent, such as Mamdani et al. (1995); Ake (2003); Chole and Ibrahim (1995).
22.It may be worth recalling here in the context of class identities that, considered as a political subject, the ‘other’ of the proletariat was not the bourgeoisie but the state and the whole political edifice of capitalism. This was, it will be remembered, the core of Lenin’s argument in What Is to Be Done?
23.Again, the list of references is a long one, but one can refer to the works of Appiah, Mudimbe and many others.
24.The idea of ‘African personality’ has been associated with Senghor. In this regard, it is interesting to peruse the collection of nationalist writings edited in the mid-1970s by Mutiso and Rohio (1975). For a sophisticated account of Senghor’s view of African art as ‘vitalist’ philosophy, see Diagne (2011).
25.See note 2.
26.One such attempt constrained by a classist framework was provided by Temu and Swai (1981).
27.This process has begun: see, especially, Badiou (2011b).
28.The extensive rise of social movements of ‘civil society’ in South Africa has, in Gillian Hart’s (2010: 90) accurate words, ‘pulled masses of researchers along in [its] wake’, much as the rise of independent trade unions in the early 1970s did to a previous generation of academics. These researchers have been concerned not with understanding people’s own political thought but with what they see a priori as people’s responses to various dimensions of their structural poverty and to neo-liberal economic policies. As people are poor, it follows for this logic that their protests must be demanding government provisioning, or ‘delivery’, in South African state parlance. For a recent example of this thinking, see Alexander (2010).
29.This was particularly the case with the student and workers’ movements of May ’68; see Ross (2002).
30.See Badiou (2009, 2011b, 2012c).
31.The notion of dignity was central to the popular upsurge in Tunisia in late 2010 (see Khiari (2011)); it is perhaps the most prevalent name for freedom today.
32.In particular, Abahlali have insisted on their thought of politics being governed by an axiom of equality; they have maintained their organisational autonomy, insisting on running their own affairs as well as founding their politics on what they call a ‘living communism’, which detaches itself from state ways of conceiving politics. See www.abahlali.org. However, by mid-2014 there were indications that this sequence may be in the process of ending as a result of repression.
33.Lindela is the detention centre outside Johannesburg where migrants to South Africa are kept before repatriation.
34.One of the few major intellectuals in Africa to retain such a confidence in the masses is Wamba-dia-Wamba; his written work has not been produced within academia and largely takes the form of political interventions in various singular contexts.
35.See his interview with Lawrence Liang in Kafila: http://kafila.org/2009/02/12/interview-with-jacques-ranciere/.
36.It should also be recalled that, simultaneously with the Paris Commune, the people of Kabylia in Algeria rebelled against French colonialism. The Cheikh Moqrani Uprising of 1871–2 was put down with equal, if not greater, ferocity than that used against the revolutionaries in Paris, while rebels from both Paris and Kabylia were often sent on the same ships in exile to New Caledonia. In fact, the Third Republic, which followed after the defeat of the Commune, opened up a major sequence of extremely violent colonial expansion by the French state. The uprising in Kabylia has generally been occluded by the Left in France. For attempts to redress the balance, see Liauzu (2010) and Blanchard et al. (2005).
37.Not as a ‘thought in practice’, a formulation which would fall into the abstract–concrete distinction; the point being that thought and practice are inseparable in politics. Lazarus (1996: 113) formulates this point as ‘politics is a thought-relation-of-the-real’, as opposed to history, which is a ‘thought-relation-of-the-state’, and philosophy, which is a ‘thought-relation-of-thought’.
38.Incidentally, if it were thought necessary, textual support for the centrality of a notion of practice can also be found in Marx’s own work. It is simply that the 1859 Preface has come to be the core ‘historical materialist’ reference for vulgar Marxism. See the following well-known statement from the third, thesis on Feuerbach for example: ‘The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionising practice’ (Marx, 1845: 29, emphasis in original). It should be recalled further that the third, thesis is concerned with a critique of vulgar materialism, which ‘arrives at dividing society into two parts of which one is superior to the other’ (p. 28).
39.By the ‘in-existent’, Badiou means those who do not exist or who only minimally exist within a particular world – for example the proletariat for Marx in 19th-century Europe. The concept is similar to the ‘zone of non-being’ in Fanon’s work, which arguably refers to existence (‘being there’) rather than to being qua being in the ontological sense. For both, it is among these people that emancipatory politics is likely to be found when it exists. For a brief definition of this term in Badiou’s philosophy, which is not restricted to politics, see Badiou (2009a: 587).
40.My translation. The original reads: ‘Le monde vous pouvez le surpasser, mais vous le surpassez de l’intérieur de ce monde, les procédures que vous inventez empruntent nécessairement, qu’elles le veuillent ou non, au définissable ambiant.’ See Badiou (2016, 15 February 2016).
PART 1
THINKING
