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
- 1 Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences
- 2 From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
- 3 Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
- 4 The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
- 5 The People's Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
- 6 From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013
- 7 Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency
- 8 Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo
- 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
6 - From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013
from Part 1 - Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
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
- 1 Theoretical introduction: Understanding historical political sequences
- 2 From Saint-Domingue to Haiti: The politics of freedom and equality, 1791–1960
- 3 Are those-who-do-not-count capable of reason? On the limits of historical thought
- 4 The National Liberation Struggle mode of politics in Africa, 1945–1975
- 5 The People's Power mode of politics in South Africa, 1984–1986
- 6 From national emancipation to national chauvinism in South Africa, 1973–2013
- 7 Rethinking militancy in the current sequence: Beyond politics as agency
- 8 Understanding fidelity to the South African emancipatory event: The Treatment Action Campaign and Abahlali baseMjondolo
- 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
To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil.
– Alain Badiou, ‘The Courage of the Present’, 2010THE LEGIBILITY OF POLITICAL SEQUENCES
Whereas the previous three chapters have been concerned to show the excessive character of various emancipatory modes of politics and the manner in which this excess interacted with expressive political subjectivity, this chapter and the next have a more analytical purpose. More precisely, they are concerned to examine how the idea of a historical sequence may be used to analyse historical changes in political subjectivities in South Africa (in this chapter) and how popular militancy may be rethought for the 21st century in Africa (in chapter 7). There is therefore a slight shift in the argument to emphasise the analytical purpose of the arguments developed so far. This will then lead me to conclude the first part of this book through an analytical comparison of two South African social movements in order to illustrate the different political subjectivities at play in each.
In order to make our period legible, it is important also to make earlier periods legible; it is this that will be attempted in the present chapter in relation to recent South African history. The sequence of national liberation struggles in Africa examined in chapter 4, which cohered around a particular set of political subjectivities emphasising freedom, justice, equality and the affirmation of a total humanity, has now ended, and consequently it has become more difficult to orient our thoughts around issues of emancipatory politics and their possible forms. The absence of emancipatory thinking today is having nefarious consequences, as it is currently difficult to imagine an Idea of an alternative future in which the youth in particular can identify with a more humane society in which massive poverty and powerlessness are not considered inevitable features of life on our continent.
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- Information
- Thinking Freedom in AfricaToward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, pp. 157 - 188Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016