for Fanon, exhibited highly problematic features after independence, as it had gradually evolved from an organisation that enabled popular expression into an apparatus of control: ‘The party which used to call itself the servant of the people, which used to claim that it worked for the full expression of the people’s will, as soon as the colonial power puts the country into its control hastens to send the people back to their caves’ (1990: 147).10 It ‘controls the masses, not in order to make sure that they really participate in the business of governing the nation, but in order to remind them constantly that the government expects from them obedience and discipline’ (p. 146). In addition, the party itself becomes the vehicle for private enrichment, which itself is both cause and effect of the formation of a ‘national bourgeoisie’ that chooses the option of a one-party state. Thus Fanon notes, ‘the bourgeoisie chooses the solution that seems to it the easiest, that of the single party’ (p. 132), while ‘the party is becoming a means of private advancement’ (p. 138). The party gradually becomes a vehicle for representing the interests of this new bourgeoisie rather than those of the people.
On the other hand, Fanon proclaims the necessity of the party by adhering to the view that solutions to political problems are never thought outside the party conception of politics itself. Thus ‘the party should be the direct expression of the masses ... [and] the masses should know that the government and the party are at their service’ (1990: 151, 160). To actualise this situation and to curb the power of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ it is still a party form of politics that Fanon invokes: ‘the combined effort of the masses led by a party, and of intellectuals who are highly conscious and armed with revolutionary principles, ought to bar the way to this useless and harmful bourgeoisie’ (p. 140, translation modified).11 The notion of the party is at the core of the problem in Fanon’s thought, as is the notion of the masses or the people. Broadly speaking, Fanon’s politics conform to the prevalent view of the 20th century that ‘the people’ are to be understood as the subject of history and that they effectuate their agency by being represented in the political arena by a party. For him, the party in power must represent the people accurately, and after independence the state-party must have a humanist programme to enable a transformation of society in the people’s interests; it cannot be a simple vehicle for enrichment: ‘In fact there must be an idea of man and of the future of humanity; that is to say that no demagogic formula and no collusion with the former occupying power can take the place of a programme’ (p. 164). Nevertheless, Fanon remains well within a subjectivity of representation. Politics must accurately represent the social.
The problem with Fanon’s politics is its inability to transcend subjectively the limits of the party-state, despite his extremely accurate observations about its bureaucratic and controlling functions. As Lazarus (2001a) has observed, the party has the effect of fusing popular consciousness with that of the state, as party discourse maintains that popular consciousness can only be realised in practice through the party and its control of state power. In this way the party enables the fusion of the subjectivity of politics with the subjectivity of the state. What this means is that the liberation of the people is to take place through control of a set of institutions that cannot conceive of liberation/freedom, as their existence is premised on the reproduction of hierarchies of power and the social division of labour. It is this – the ideological fusing capacity of the party – that makes possible the transition from the nation as political affirmation to the nation as social category, which, in other words, makes possible the party-state and the nation-state, the latter being nothing but the final objective form of this subjective fusion. Whether there is one party or several is of little significance; nor is the replacement of ‘party’ by ‘movement’, as in either case these are said to represent the social. Rather, what is of importance is the subjective conception that maintains that politics can only be effectuated through the (party-)state.
Subjectively, then, state politics is a reaction to what Badiou (2009a) would call the ‘event’ of the popular emancipatory sequence. Fanon himself provides the best example of an individual who commits himself to forming part of a collective political subject and whose consistent fidelity to the event enables it to become a truth: ‘The true is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonial regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation’ (Fanon, 1990: 39, translation modified). On the other hand, the reactive subject embodied in the state’s political subjectivity is one which maintains that, although it enabled the formation of a newly independent state, the emancipatory sequence was little more than mindless violence. Yet this is not all. As we have seen, Badiou also refers to an ‘obscure subject’ also resulting from the same event. In the realm of politics, Badiou associates this conception with that of fascism, although in the context of neo-colonialism it more accurately refers to the neo-colonial discursive powers of occlusion: according to these, the specificity of colonised formations is said not to exist, colonialism is now over and was supposedly beneficial anyway, independence was granted by the ex-colonial power, etc. In this way the stage is set for regular antagonism between state nationalism and neo-colonial oppression, as well as for the contradictory character of nationalism itself, partly critic and partly adherent of colonial and neo-colonial discourses (Chatterjee, 1986).
The reactive subjectivity attempts to reduce the Idea to the social and thus depoliticises, statises and socialises it so that the earlier world continues to all intents and purposes; it attempts a distortion of the Idea, often through the use of expertise in social science. The obscure subject, on the other hand, tries to delete the Idea altogether. We can see relatively clearly the reactive and obscure subjects unfolding in subjectivity in the postcolonial period. In particular, the project of ‘nation-building’ understood as a state subjectivity, constituted in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, amounts to a state reaction to the idea of the nation as subjective becoming, which Fanon outlined so clearly and which he wished to extend into a humanist project (Gibson, 2003).12 Fanon’s humanist project, which depended precisely on human agency, ends up being replaced by a ‘nation-building’ project founded on a technicist – technicist because statist – project of national development, which is unavoidably combined with patronage power relations, given the absence of an independently organised popular politics (Neocosmos, 2010b). Concurrently, the shift to xenophobic nationalism noted and deplored by Fanon is an indication of the rise of communitarian politics, as obscurity is allowed to descend on a purely political conception of the nation. Fanon is the only major theorist of African nationalism in the 20th century to develop a conception of nationalism – in his terms, ‘nationalist consciousness’ – that is non-identitarian, while all state forms of nationalism are identitarian in their essence. It is because Fanon’s conception of the nation and nationalism is non-identitarian that it forms the basis of an emancipatory politics of becoming.
Such an emancipatory conception of the nation can only be understood in excess of state politics. As soon as such politics are objectified and related to social categories, we become situated within an identitarian politics that is state-focused (e.g. through the medium of a party or a movement) and that contributes to making a sequence illegible. Moreover, while in the immediate postcolonial period state politics at least had a national project, today the disappearance of any genuinely inclusive conception of the nation, even at the level of the state itself, has allowed for the development of a communitarian identity politics that feeds on the kind of free-for-all which the new forms of neo-colonial domination have enabled. Recent events in Kenya (2007), South Africa (2008 and, even more recently, 2015), Nigeria (2009 and 2010) and elsewhere illustrate this rise in communitarian politics. It is in this context that what used to be known as the ‘national question’ is crying out to be (re-)addressed; it is within this same context that nationalism today must be given new forms in order to recover the kind of subjective becoming that Fanon extolled in the Algerian people’s struggle for freedom.13
The nation today is modelled by a politics of exclusion, itself founded on social indigeneity. Yet, in the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, such xenophobia was limited in its extent by a number of intervening conceptions in state politics such as a certain (although recast) statist pan-Africanism, a statist nationalism (which did, however, suggest a certain amount of independence from neo-colonial prescriptions) and a conception of national development
