TO AFRICAN HISTORICAL POLITICAL SEQUENCES
Perhaps we should say today that, insofar as politics is concerned, the real will only be discovered by renouncing the historicist fiction – in other words, the fiction that History is on our side.
– Alain Badiou, À la recherché du réel perdu, 2015 (my translation)
An event is the sudden creation, not of a new reality, but of myriad new possibilities, none of which is a repetition of the already known. This is why it is obscurantist to say ‘this movement demands democracy’ (meaning the kind we enjoy in the West) or ‘this movement demands social improvement’ (meaning the middle prosperity of our petty bourgeoisie). Beginning from practically nothing, resonating everywhere, this popular upsurge creates unknown possibilities for the entire world.
– Alain Badiou, Le Réveil de l’histoire, 2011 (my translation)
Does history begin only from the moment of the launching of the phenomenon of class, and consequently class struggle? To reply in the affirmative would be ... to consider – and this we refuse to accept – that various human groups in Asia, Africa and Latin America were living without history or outside history at the moment when they were subjected to the yoke of imperialism.
– Amílcar Cabral, Presuppositions and objectives of national liberation in relation to social structure, 1966 (Unity and Struggle, 1980, emphasis in original)
The people and the people alone are the makers of universal history.
– Alain Badiou, Le Réveil de l’histoire, 2011 (my translation)
Chapter 1
Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences
In so far as [politics] is a sequential subjectivity, any investigation in terms of continuity and gradual unfolding is precluded, and the relations previously proposed between history and politics, wherein it was maintained that it was through history – the bearer of a notion of continuity whether in movement or by means of a dialectic – that politics became intelligible, are now broken.
– Sylvain Lazarus, Anthropologie du nom, 1996 (my translation)
The return to a state logic is a consequence of the termination of a political sequence, not its cause. Defeat is not the essence of effectuation.
– Sylvain Lazarus, Anthropologie du nom, 1996 (my translation)
THINKING THE IMMANENT EXCEPTION
Africans were integrated into European ‘modernity’ through the slave trade. Yet rather than being its pathetic victims, they were able to think as human beings and to actualise that thought during particular exceptional events. It was not simply that people opposed oppression and that rebellions took place; it was also, and more importantly, that in some cases an excessive subjectivity of freedom came to dominate their thinking. The most important of these was without doubt what has become known as the Haitian Revolution from 1791 to 1804, which was an event of world significance. Its effects would have been even more far-reaching had not the modern European and North American states banded together to fight its radical humanist consequences by each and every means available to them. They continue to do so today. I begin from this event both because of its world significance and, more prosaically, in order to utilise it as a way of illustrating some of the more important theoretical categories and concepts to be encountered throughout this book. I need, however, to provide a brief introduction to some of these categories themselves which will be deployed in this first part of the book. Two fundamental conceptual issues inform my discussion of the history of the emancipatory struggles undertaken by Africans. The first concerns the idea of the exception, what I have already referred to as the subjective ‘excess’; the second refers to the problem of rationally explaining historical time. Both, in one way or another, stem from Hegel’s philosophy.
We should begin from the idea of the exception as thought by Badiou and Rancière. Rancière, as we have seen, refers to the exception as the central feature of people who speak, who move ‘out of place’.1 In fact, this exception in politics is for him identifiable ex post facto in the form of a historical event which, in addition, is the manifestation or realisation of equality (Rancière, 1995, 2012). For Badiou, on the other hand, the exception is thought of as an event in itself – although historical, the event is potentially political. The event is what creates the possibility of excessive thought; it is purely internal to the situation, for it is always located in an ‘evental site’. An exceptional event can be recognised as it occurs. As Badiou notes, it is ‘the sudden creation of a myriad new possibilities ... none of which is a repetition of the already known’ (Badiou, 2011a, my translation). In order to be able to think this exception, however, a certain theoretical orientation towards the human capacity for understanding is necessary so that it can indeed be recognised as exceptional. In particular, Badiou insists that thinking the exception must begin with a principled distancing from empiricism and its belief that the ‘limits of knowledge’ are given by experience:
Today we have the triumph of empiricism ... The victory of empiricism is evidently the fact that any convincing argumentation is one which emphasises constraints. It is said that it is from these that one must begin. This is not the case for a principled activity; this does not mean that constraints must be ignored, but that the point of departure is the law that we propose concerning what we want, what we desire etc. ... The question of ‘changing the world’ is ... not fundamentally a question of analysing the world and of the alternative evaluation we may have of it. It is a question that essentially comes down to the opposition, between a form of thought that begins from principles and a perspective that begins from reality (Badiou, 2012c, my translation, emphasis in original).
This is a fundamental point. We must indeed insist that there are always exceptions and that it is always possible to shift the limits of knowledge. The core idea that enables the thought of exceptions is, according to Badiou (2013f), the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung (to overcome, to supersede, to exceed, to sublate). If human subjective capacity were seen as limited by experience, it would follow that there must be strict limits to human understanding. These limits are here ultimately provided, not by reason, but by the experience of what exists, to which reason is forced to comply. What this argument means is that one cannot limit thought to an empiricist position that describes and analyses the extant, without at the same time denying the possibility of exceptions to those descriptions and analyses – at least, exceptions which are immanent to the situation itself (rather than emanating from beyond its limits, from outside). What follows, according to Badiou, is that underlying all empiricist thought is a passivity that governs human subjectivity. He insists that ‘one must understand by empiricism the idea that everything must be founded on a primordial passivity amounting to cumulative external effects’ on subjectivity.2 In fact, empiricism ‘necessarily leads to a theory of the practical and cognitive limits of human capacity (the fundamental theme of the “limits of reason”)’ (2013f, my translation). Both reason and subjectivity are thus, in this perspective, constrained by experience. Exceptions are not thinkable within empiricism other than as externalities themselves.
Empiricism is characterised by an essential connection regarding what is possible within the law of the world: it is the world itself that determines what is possible. On the other hand, from an emancipatory perspective, there is always a moment when one is obliged to say that a possibility results from an active confrontation between the state of the world on the one hand and principles on the other; a moment when one can declare to be possible something which the weight of the world declares to be impossible. If the expression ‘to change the world’ is to have any meaning at all,
