in particular, state fetishism is so pervasive within the hegemonic political discourse that debate is structured by the apparently self-evident ‘common-sense’ notion that the post-apartheid state can ‘deliver’ everything from jobs to empowerment, from development to human rights, from peace in Africa to a cure for HIV/AIDS. As a result, not only is the state deified, but social debate is foreclosed ab initio; the idea simply becomes one of assessing policy or capacity; in other words, the focus is on management, not on politics. Badiou enables us to begin to think a way around this problem by showing that the state is always what prescribes subjectively, within a given situation, what is possible and impossible in that situation.14 He notes: ‘The state organises and maintains, often by force, the distinction between what is possible and what is not’ (Badiou, 2009d: 192, my translation). It follows, then, that an event is something that occurs which, despite being always localised, is subtracted from the power of the state, something which overturns given ‘facts’ and which thereby enables the rise of a number of possibilities and a possible universal subjectivity or ‘truth’ valid across ‘worlds’. Given that the state is what organises and manages differences, emancipatory politics must then transcend differences.
For Badiou, therefore, emancipatory politics are ‘indifferent’ to identities, to difference.15 The ‘indifference to differences’ simply means that an emancipatory politics is universal and not linked to or ‘representative’ of any specific interest; it is ‘for all’, never ‘for some’. It follows that emancipatory politics do not ‘represent’ anyone:
Politics begins when one decides not to represent victims ... but to be faithful to those events during which victims politically assert themselves ... Politics in no way represents the proletariat, class or nation ... it is not a question of whether something which exists may be represented. Rather, it concerns that through which something comes to exist which nothing represents, and which purely and simply presents its own existence (Badiou, 1985: 75, 87).
An emancipatory politics, therefore, cannot be deduced from a social category (class, nation, state, history, economics, culture or tradition); it can only be understood in terms of itself, for it exceeds the thought of the social. Moreover, the state itself is ‘indifferent’ to truths and thus also to (emancipatory) politics; the democratic state in particular is merely concerned with knowledges and opinions, which it organises into a consensus.
Historically speaking, there have been some political orientations that have had or will have a connection with a truth, a truth of the collective as such. They are rare attempts and they are often brief ... These political sequences are singularities: they do not trace a destiny, nor do they construct a monumental history ... from the people they engage, these orientations require nothing but their strict generic humanity (Badiou, 2003: 70, emphasis in original).
Emancipatory politics, therefore, may or may not exist at any time and must be understood as pertaining exclusively to the realm of thought, for it is only thought that can effect fundamental change: ‘any politics of emancipation, or any politics which imposes an egalitarian maxim, is a thought in act’ (p. 71).
Where does all this leave the conceptualisation of contemporary politics on the African continent? The answer provided by Wamba-dia-Wamba is that one must identify modes of politics historically present in Africa, and also, and more importantly, specify the basic characteristics of possible emancipatory modes of politics on the continent today (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994). The latter project is, in his writings, highly informed by the analysis of Lazarus.
Politics (political capacity, political consciousness), the active prescriptive relationship to reality, exists under the condition of people who believe that politics must exist ... Generally in Africa, the tendency has been to assign it [this political capacity] to the state (including the party and liberation movements functioning really as state structures) per se. Unfortunately, the state cannot transform or redress itself: it kills this prescriptive relationship to reality by imposing consensual unanimity ... the thrust of progressive politics is to be separated from the state. It is not possible to achieve a democratic state, i.e. a state that is transparent to, rather than destructive of, people’s viewpoints, if people only ‘think’ state, internalize state and thus self-censor themselves (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 1994: 258).
In postcolonial Africa, therefore, one form or another of state fetishism has been the dominant way of conceiving the political capacity to transform reality. Nonetheless, I do attempt in this book to specify some of the features of a ‘National Liberation Struggle’ mode, which could at times enable a politics that was not exclusively state-focused and that can be said to have existed prior to independence to various extents. However, if the problem in Africa has been state thinking, then a new way of conceiving politics must be developed ‘at a distance’ from the state. Wamba-dia-Wamba has suggested that while it is the popular masses that enable ‘events’, the masses often possess a blind faith in the state or in those individuals whom they associate with change. It is the breaking of this blind faith that constitutes the political possibility of fidelity to the event, and it is those activists that militate for such a break who today engage in emancipatory politics on the African continent.16
HISTORICAL SUBJECTIVE MODES OF POLITICS
According to Lazarus (1996: 121ff), the Ancient Greeks invented politics, not just democracy; the two were in fact the same thing. This, he argues, was the condition for the invention of history as a reflection on social life – i.e. what we would today call social thought. His argument is founded on a study of the work of Moses Finley, one of the foremost authorities on Greek antiquity.17 For Finley, we can speak of the ‘invention’ of history by the Greeks,18 an invention that cannot be grasped as a passage from a mythical conception of the past to a rational conception of the past. The supposed break or rupture from mythical conceptions and turn to rational ones, which forms the basis of the positivist account, is unsustainable, for the rise of history does not supplant mythology but operates in parallel with it. Even in Herodotus (regarded as one of the first scientific historians), references to myths continue. Lazarus reads Finley as suggesting that history is a capacity, and a provisional capacity at that; a capacity that Lazarus names ‘sequential’, for it corresponds to a provisional subjective capacity which delimits a specific historical sequence. For Finley, history is not an invariant; any society or period does not necessarily have a history. There are societies which do not produce history, and not just those without states and without writing. The absence of history is not indicative of an absence of historical sources. Rather, in order for history to exist there should be a generation which has thought its own situation, its own conditions of life. The history (in this self-reflexive sense) of this generation is possible both for itself and also for future historians. There is therefore not always a capacity for history; this refers to a specific mode of thought contemporaneous with itself.
Two theses follow, according to Lazarus. Firstly, there can only be history which is contemporaneous with itself, and a specific consciousness is necessary for it to exist; secondly, the existence of a contemporaneous history is not always given. Not all generations possess this capacity or consciousness. Thus, history exists only under the condition of such a consciousness: only under such conditions can statements, formulations and generalisations be constructed with regard to the particular situation. For Finley, the condition of this capacity of an epoch to produce a history is nothing other than the existence of politics. The invention of history for Finley is contemporaneous with the invention of the ‘polis’, and particularly with the invention of politics. History is not connected to the state as such, but to the existence of politike techne, to political agency and excessive thought. It is not possible to explain the discovery of history by the Greeks as a matter of moving from an irrational mode of thinking to a rational one, but only as one of ‘invention’. For Lazarus, politics is also an invention, irreducible to the state, to classes, to the management of the social, to power. A specific subjective invention, politics is not permanent; it is, in Lazarus’s terms, ‘sequential and rare’. History and, by inference, social sciences
