circumstances which are always of an exceptional nature (Badiou, 2012c, my translation, emphasis in original).
One must note the strictly conservative limits of empiricism (conservative in the etymological sense) because one cannot possibly think change within a situation or social world if one begins from description and analysis, i.e. from the demarcation of the limits of people’s lives in society, the social structures and institutions that contain and determine them, the discourses and subjectivities in which they also are forced to think by power, and so on. These are precisely the kinds of accounts that dominate in Africa today, irrespective of whether they are political-economic, structuralist or post-structuralist, postcolonial, nationalist or neo-liberal in persuasion (see Mbembe, 2013). They are the stuff of knowledge in 21st-century Africa; I have qualified them as ‘the tyranny of the objective’, for they make it impossible to think political choices, as history and society determine all thinking (Neocosmos, 2012a: 468). Knowledge, however, must be firmly distinguished from thought, which is always excessive, beyond the ‘normal’ and the ‘habitual’, oriented towards what could be rather than simply to what exists (Lazarus, 2012). The point here, it must be emphasised, is to make an argument not for ignoring empirical evidence, but rather for not seeing it as the ultimate limit of thought; empirical evidence must be used fundamentally as a necessary reference point for reason.3 One must therefore start with an affirmation that can be rationally maintained. The rational affirmation maintained here, as I have already stated, is that people think. For Rancière – as indeed for Fanon, as we shall see – not only do people think, but they change themselves through thinking:
The great emancipatory movements have been movements in the present, ones of increased competencies, perhaps as much as and even more than movements destined to prepare another future ... These are people who become capable of things they were previously incapable of, who accomplish a break through the wall of the possible ... people do not come together in order to realise a future equality; a certain kind of equality is realised by the act of coming together (Rancière, 2012: 207, my translation).
It is this process that is referred to as ‘subjectivation’, the creation of a political subject. Given that such a process is one of exceeding identity, Rancière refers to it as a rational ‘dis-identification’: ‘Any subjectivation is a dis-identification, a tearing-away from the naturalness of place, the opening of a subject space where anyone can be counted’ (Rancière, 1995: 60, my translation). Because of ‘dis-identification’ there is always a universal aspect to emancipatory politics. Moreover, an excessive subjectivity is always connected in some way or other with a politics expressive of social place (the idea and practice of equality only exist in relation to forms of inequality), simply because excess always exceeds something and is always ‘internal’ to the situation, as Badiou (2010b: 146–7) puts it. The level of excess, of distance from the expressive (from identity) – what might be called the ‘excessive gap’ – varies in each case of subjectivation and is irretrievably marked by it, even if only in a negative way.4 The existence of excessive thought, which always includes some universal notion of human equality, along with the political principles it enunciates, defines a specific historical sequence, which, as we shall see, is not to be understood as part of a continuous unfolding over time. At the same time, it is the dialectical relation between the excessive and the expressive that regulates the ability of the excessive to sustain itself and what Lazarus (1996) calls its eventual ‘saturation’. The idea of freedom as understood by Africans within different emancipatory sequences illuminates this dialectic and in a sense helps us to understand the limits of the sequence in question.
For example, the manner in which the slaves in Haiti understood freedom in 1791 differs from how they understood it after 1796 and how the ex-slaves began to think it after 1804. In the first instance it referred to legal emancipation, in the second to national state independence. The first notion was limited by the expressive constraints of a legal conception; the second by a statist one. Similar points can be made with regard to the manner in which freedom was thought during the independence struggles in the 1950s and 1960s and also, in the South African case, in the 1980s. The expressive–excessive dialectic enables us to understand both the character of that subjectivity and its limitations; it therefore enables us to identify the limits of the historical sequence’s unfolding.
THE IDEA, POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY AND THE PROBLEM OF OBJECTIVE HISTORICAL TIME
The second issue in any attempt to understand emancipatory political subjectivities concerns a discussion of historical analysis, for it is the discipline of history that is said to account for politics over time and thus to make it intelligible. This question concerns the problems inherent in any attempt to isolate different political sequences – particularly emancipatory sequences – in Africa that illustrate the making by Africans of their history as well as their contribution to world history as a whole. At the same time, it is also an attempt to think of possible new forms of periodisation that stress discontinuous sequential subjective singularities as opposed to the objective periodisations that usually highlight structural changes, such as forms of economy and capitalism or forms of state. These have included, for example, the divisions between merchant capitalism (16th–18th centuries), industrial capitalism (19th century), imperial or monopoly capitalism (end of 19th century to mid-20th century) and globalisation (1973 to the present). They have also included periodisation in terms of the distinctions between ‘traditional–modern–postmodern’ and particularly those between ‘precolonial–colonial–postcolonial’, which is the most common and seemingly the most obvious. Such periodisations stress both continuity and fundamentally objective changes; they are historicist and, as a result, force thought into specific parameters, thereby excluding different modes of thought.
It can be noted, for example, that the standard procedure of demarcating African history along the precolonial–colonial–postcolonial temporal dimension has two major consequences. Firstly, it focuses on changes in state forms and privileges European domination as the norm around which history is plotted and thought; secondly, it has had the consequence of occluding what is arguably the most important event in modern African history – the slave trade – for it cannot be contained within this view of historical change. In particular, the slave trade does not feature within histories of international migration, even though it can be seen as the first instance of ‘forced migration’ on a massive scale. Historians and economists of migration regularly fall into this obvious error, only partly because they, together with demographers, tend to understand the migratory process as a voluntary one; in fact, slavery is not thought fundamentally as a political process. For example, Adepoju (1995) uses this threefold periodisation in his discussion of the history of migration on the continent. The Atlantic slave trade simply disappears from his vision altogether. It is not seen as precolonial, as this concerns distinct African societies untrammelled by Western domination. It is not a feature of colonialism, as this concerns the political dominance of Africa by the Western powers and the construction of colonial states, beginning in the late 19th century, when the slave trade had legally ended. The result is that it simply disappears from the horizon of his inquiry altogether.
Moreover, if it is the case that African peoples were controlled, exploited and oppressed by foreign powers before the colonial period proper, which was undeniably the case, then it follows that the ‘state-colonial’ period (i.e. from the 1890s to the 1960s) is not the only time period when such foreign oppression, and hence national reaction, can be seen to have taken place. A ‘precolonial’ colonial form of domination (so to speak) also suggests a postcolonial one. It suggests that it is possible to conceive of colonialism beyond the narrow period of formal state-colonial domination; in other words, as not exclusively defined by a particular state form.5 It implies the possibility at least of various contemporary neo-colonial forms of colonial domination right into the current period of globalisation.6 The defining feature of colonialism is thus not the existence of a colonial state as such, but a set of oppressive politics enabling foreign domination, with the consequence, as I shall show in Part 2, that the people are considered by the state as its enemy.
