Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
As the people had not appeared for a single moment on the scene of public affairs for one hundred and forty years, the powerful had completely ceased to believe that they could ever do so. Seemingly unconscious, the people were assumed to be deaf, with the consequence that when interest in their condition revived, the powerful would speak of them, before them, as if they were absent. It seemed as though their only listeners were to be those placed above the people and that the only danger they faced was not to be understood by the latter.
– Alexis de Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la révolution, 1856 (my translation)It is essential to tear away political practice from a fascination with power.
– Alain Badiou, ‘Le Socialisme est-il le réel dont le communisme est l'idée?’, 2011 (my translation)POLITICAL REPRESENTATION AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
In her excellent book on May 1968 in France, Kristin Ross (2002) argues that the importance of that particular event lies elsewhere than in the question of whether it was a ‘failed revolution’ or not. Rather, she suggests, ‘the narrative of a desired or failed seizure of power … is a narrative determined by the logic of the state, the story the state tells to itself. For the state, people in the streets are people always already failing to seize state power’ (p. 74). Focusing on the dimension of power – and thereby restricting the idea of politics to the state – has served to efface what was perhaps the predominant threat to power of that event: ‘the subjectivation enabled by the synchronization of two very different temporalities: the world of the worker and the world of the student’ (p. 74). The subjectivation produced by this transcendence of the categories of the social division of labour as well as with the identities that accompany them ‘lay in the verification of equality not as an objective of action, but as something that is part and parcel of action, something that emerges in the struggle and is lived and declared as such’ (p. 74).
Ross recounts that practices were developed that ‘demonstrated such a synchroni-zation’. Because they revealed the irrelevance of the division of labour, they formed ‘as direct an intervention into the logic and workings of capital as any seizure of the state – perhaps more so’ (p. 74).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Thinking Freedom in AfricaToward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, pp. 532 - 551Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016