in the ‘public sphere’. In Badiou’s more recent work (e.g. Badiou, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c), a complex theory is developed in which the event is understood as a specific form of becoming that inaugurates real change (he calls this a ‘site’) with maximum existence (which he calls a ‘singularity’) and with maximal consequences. A singularity with non-maximal consequences he calls a ‘weak singularity’, while sites with non-maximal existence he simply calls ‘facts’. ‘Modifications’ are those forms of becoming without real change (Badiou, 2009a: 363–80). In the same work, Badiou now speaks of ‘worlds’ rather than ‘situations’ as he did earlier: ‘There is no stronger transcendental consequence than the one which makes what did not exist in a world appear within it’ (Badiou, 2009a: 376). The popular struggles in different parts of Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, a period that was optimistically referred to as the ‘second liberation’ of the continent, forced new issues onto the agenda for a while, before these were again pushed into the background as state politics re-established itself (see Ake, 1996). Apart from the specific case of South Africa from 1984 to 1986, most of these changes were arguably simply facts or weak singularities, such as the ‘Marikana moment’ in South Africa in August 2012, which I discuss in detail in a later chapter.28
The other major concept of Badiou’s philosophy is the subject. For Badiou, the subject is the ‘active ... bearer of [a] dialectical overcoming ... Borne by an active intraworldly body, a subject prescribes the effects of this body and their consequences by introducing a cut and a tension into the organisation of places’ (2009a: 45). The political subject thus contests social places. A subject is not to be conflated with an individual – ‘an individual is not a subject “spontaneously”’ (Badiou, 2011e: 12, my translation) – in politics a subject is, in fact, always collective. A political subject is thus much more than a mere bearer of agency; it is a collective body made up of individuals who have ‘decided to become part of a political truth procedure; to become in short ... militant[s] of this truth’ (Badiou, 2009c: 184, my translation). Such an individual is ‘an active part of this new subject’ (p. 185). The political subject is both active and ‘excessive’ (or ‘prescriptive’) in the sense that it exceeds in thought and practice the complexity of the given extant of social relations, ideologies, places, hierarchies, divisions of labour, etc. For example, the slaves of Saint-Domingue formed themselves into a political subject by affirming their humanity collectively. Badiou continues by arguing that a subject is formed in particular through fidelity to an event and that this fidelity gives rise to a truth which is universal (or eternal). A truth is thus produced and not discovered; a subject is also produced as a result of a process. Moreover, a truth procedure is that process which produces a real change in a particular world. It should also be noted in passing that for Badiou there are four truth procedures (politics, science, love and art), but here I am only concerned with politics. This process of political subjectivation (or subjectification or subjectivisation) must therefore be studied rationally, as its characteristics cannot be known in advance, for these are not expressive; we are no longer within the perspective of a (class, national, ethnic) consciousness produced by a party of intellectuals according to pre-given theory.
Finally, a singularity that may give rise to a universal and eternal truth is always specifically located and is in excess of what exists in that location; in other words, it must cut across – interrupt in a singular manner – the specifics of a particular situation or world in order to give rise to a universal. In sum, for Badiou, subjects are not the result of state interpellations or discourses of power. It is not a Foucauldian analysis which is of relevance here; subjects exist only in so far as these retain a fidelity to the consequences of an event (past or present) which makes possible the excess over the extant; they become the subject of a truth of this event. It is thus the sustainment of a politics of excess which produces subjects; this cannot be thought of as an ‘automatic process’ but only as one of conscious becoming.29 Badiou has recently argued that the new subjects produced by an event in a world are of different kinds and are not limited to the faithful subject. He now recognises that an event also creates new forms of subjects through reaction and obscurantism. In so far as political subjects are concerned:
The world exposes a variant of the gap between the state and the affirmative capacity of the mass of people ... A body comes to be constructed under the injunction of [the evental trace] which always takes the form of an organisation. Articulated point by point, the subjectivated body permits the production of a present which we can call, to borrow a concept from Sylvain Lazarus, a ‘historical mode of politics’. Empirically speaking this is a political sequence (73–71 BC for Spartacus, 1905–17 for Bolshevism, 1792–94 for the Jacobins, 1965–68 for the Cultural Revolution in China ...). The reactive subject carries the reactionary inventions of the sequence (the new form of resistance to the new) into the heart of the people [le peuple] or of people in general [les gens]. For a long time this has taken the form of reaction. The names of reaction are sometimes typical of the sequence, for instance ‘Thermidorian’ for the French Revolution, or ‘Modern Revisionists’ for the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The obscure subject engineers the destruction of the body: the appropriate word is fascism, but in a broader sense than the fascism of the thirties. One will speak of generic fascism to describe the destruction of the organised body through which the construction of the present (of the sequence) had previously passed (Badiou, 2009a: 72, translation modified).30
Here Badiou refers us back to Lazarus’s categories for the analysis of politics as a sequential subjectivity. In addition, in this argument, the faithful subject, the reactive subject and the obscure subject are all contemporary to the excessive novelty to which they react. The roles of these three subjects may be said to be as follows:
As the militant orientation of its own becoming, the faithful subject weaves the present of the body as a new time of truth. The reactive subject is all which orients the conservation of previous economic and political forms (capitalism and parliamentary democracy) in the conditions of existence of the new body ... The obscure subject wants the death of the new body (Badiou, 2009b: 107–8, 109, emphasis in original).
Badiou develops the distinction between the reactive and obscure subjects at some length:
It is crucial to gauge the gap between reactive formalism and obscure formalism. As violent as it may be, reaction conserves the form of the faithful subject as its articulated unconscious. It does not propose to abolish the present, only to show that the faithful rupture (which it calls ‘violence’ or ‘terrorism’) is useless for engendering a moderate, that is to say extinguished, present (a present that it calls ‘modern’) ... Things stand differently for the obscure subject. That is because it is the present that is directly its unconscious, its lethal disturbance, while it disarticulates within appearance the formal data of fidelity ... [It entertains] everywhere and at all times the hatred of any living thought, of any transparent language and of every uncertain becoming (2009a: 61, cit. Power and Toscano, 2009: 29, translation modified).
In addition, Badiou makes the important point that whatever the seeming victory of reaction or obscurantism, a subject can be reactivated ‘in another logic of its appearing-in-truth’; this he calls a ‘resurrection’ (2009a: 65). The example he gives is instructive. He refers to the ‘resurrection’ of the slave rebellion led by Spartacus in 73–71 BC, first by Toussaint Louverture in Saint-Domingue, who was referred to as the ‘Black Spartacus’ by General Laveaux in 1796, and second in 1919 by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who called themselves ‘Spartakists’. He concludes: ‘the subject whose name is “Spartacus” travels from world to world through the centuries. Ancient Spartacus, Black Spartacus, Red Spartacus’ (p. 65). In this way a new event, a new trace and a new body are generated, and previously occluded events are extracted from their occlusion, are remembered and recaptured politically.31 Finally, Badiou notes that ‘the turnstile of the three subjective types defines a sequence of history’ (2009b: 111), meaning that the manner in which these three subjects interrelate may enable us to delimit a sequence32 and help us to know its truth:
One
