Africa in Theory: A Conversation Between Jean Comaroff and Achille Mbembe

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ETHICS OF SCALE: RELOCATING POLITICS AFTER LIBERATION

Africa in Theory: A ConversationBetween Jean Comaroff and Achille MbembeModerated & Edited by Jesse Weaver Shipley

Achille MbembeI would like to start with an anecdote. I first met Jean Comaroff not literal-ly, but through her thought provoking, generous, and hospitable Body ofPower, Spirit of Resistance during the winter of 1987. I was then on a FordFoundation grant, spending a year at the University of Madison-Wisconsin—my first ever trip to the United States. I was writing a book on “political reli-gion”—in this case Christianity—published in Paris a year later under thetitle Afriques indociles. Christianisme, pouvoir et État en société postcoloniale(Paris, Karthala, 1988)— like the rest of my work in French, a book hardlyknown in the Anglo-Saxon world. I went to Memorial Library that night notknowing that the book existed and never having heard of Jean Comaroff. Istumbled over the book accidentally while trudging through the shelves. Itook it home and spent almost the entire night reading it. Since then, Bodyof Power has not only remained with me; it has pursued me, and it is easyto find its echoes in the deepest recesses of On the Postcolony.

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 3, pp. 653–678, ISSN 0003-549. © 2010 by the Institute for EthnographicResearch (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.

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Africa in Theory: A Conversation Between Jean Comaroff and Achille Mbembe

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Body of Power is a detailed, vivid, and richly textured historiography ofeveryday life in a remote and not so remote corner of South Africa underapartheid—from the minutiae of dress, spatial organization, bodily ges-tures to productive techniques, rites of initiation, and cult practices. It is apowerful example of how we should think and write about human agency;what analytical strategies we should deploy in order to describe and inter-pret specific forms of social life in particular settings. Situated beyond thestrictures of positivist epistemology and objectivist ontology, it is also anaccount of what is life for and what is most at stake, especially for peopleliving in what Jean calls “the shadow of the modern world system”—peo-ple who are forced to undo and remake their lives under conditions of pre-cariousness and uncertainty.That this amazing book, a combination of thick ethnography, interpre-

tive history, and symbolic analysis, helped to set the stage for the criticaldebates on the forms and methods of social inquiry that dominated themid-1980s to mid-1990s has not been sufficiently recognized for variousreasons. Unfortunately, the most compelling reason is that the immediateand most apparent object of Body of Power is the study of life forms in thisplace called Africa.As a name and as a sign, Africa has always occupied a paradoxical posi-

tion in modern formations of knowledge. On the one hand, it has beenlargely assumed that “things African” are residual entities, the study ofwhich does not contribute anything to the knowledge of the world or of thehuman condition in general. Rapid surveys, off-the-cuff remarks, and anec-dotes with sensational value suffice. On the other hand, it has always beenimplicitly acknowledged that in the field of social sciences and the human-ities, there is no better laboratory than Africa to gauge the limits of ourepistemological imagination or to pose questions about how we know whatwe know and what that knowledge is grounded upon; how to draw on mul-tiple models of time so as to avoid one-way causal models; how to open aspace for broader comparative undertakings; and how to account for themultiplicity of the pathways and trajectories of change.In fact, there is no better terrain than Africa for a scholarship keen to

describe novelty, originality, and complexity. Those of us who live and workin Africa know first hand that the ways in which societies compose andinvent themselves in the present—what we could call the creativity of prac-tice—is always ahead of the knowledge we can ever produce about them.Therefore, to think or to theorize from Africa implies an acute awareness of


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Moderated & Edited by JESSE WEAVER SHIPLEY

the existence of this rift—even a full embrace of this rift which is at thesame time a risk, and the understanding that “the social” is less a matter oforder and contract than a matter of composition and experiment; that whatultimately binds societies might be some kind of artifice they have come tobelieve in; the realization that societies’ capacity to continually producesomething new and singular, as yet unthought, which is yet to be accommo-dated within established conceptual systems and languages—this is indeedthe condition of possibility of social theorizing as such. Africa teaches usthis and much more, yet we underestimate the power of Africa to renewcontemporary social theory at our expense.Let me now say a few words about what so powerfully attracted me to

Body of Power and, later on, to Jean and John Comaroff ’s work in gener-al. Interestingly enough, this might have more to do with my own way ofreading this work than with her original intentions, my own strategy ofcoercing her to speak in my own tongue. But does it really matter? In thefield of African Studies, then dominated by descriptivism and artisanship,Body of Power was one of the few studies to engage so explicitly and soboldly with several key concerns of the social theory of the time—thematter of form, questions of historical agency, the connection of context,intentionality, and what today we would call subjectivity but which, inthose days, had another name—consciousness or even ideology. Andthere was more—the making of practice and the pragmatics of repetitionand change, the thorny question of power and domination, resistance andliberation, and, more generally, the vexing issue of the body and its unfin-ished yet excessive qualities, of the nature and figures of the political.How to account for all of this in the wake not only of structuralism, butof the demise of certain forms of Marxism, the collapse of theories ofmodernization, and the crisis of certain forms of world-system analysis.This was, it seems to me, the challenge then.Jean Comaroff confronted this challenge head-on, with a good dose of

courage, elegance, and ingenuity. Perhaps more than any other work inAfrican studies at the time, Body of Power helped us to understand that his-torical cultural structures are not necessarily mechanical reflections ofunderlying social and economic structures. In fact, they are equal to themin “ontological” standing. In turn, social and economic structures are them-selves as much objective facts (if this means anything at all) as they are theproducts of the interpretive work of human actors. The book was publishedat a time when positivism was still alive in a number of fields. But its over-



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all influence was already diminishing, at least in the humanities. The cut-ting edge of innovation was shifting away from structuralism, even socialhistory to the new cultural history in its various forms. In any case Jeanshowed us how we could expand the ethnographic reach within Africa with-out losing the capacity to make general analytical and theoretical points.This could be done if, on the one hand, we took seriously the task of his-toricizing institutions, practices, and cultural repertoires and, on the otherhand, if we took just as seriously the reality of the long-term sedimentationof experience—la longue durée.I would now like to expand on the other side of the book—that which

has specifically to do with Africa, with what is at stake in writing aboutAfrica and theorizing the present, in writing Africa into the world at largeand into social theory in particular. For me, it is this question of theoriz-ing the present, the contemporary—this question of thinking and writingcritically about contingency and human agency—that gave this book itsedge. The present in those days was obviously not what the present istoday—which, for our conversation, raises the perennial question of new-ness, of how we are to define newness, of what could be the most substan-tive ways of engaging with the question of newness, especially in Africa.The other major interrogation in the book that caught my attention washow to account for the manifold ways in which people inhabit the worldand make sense of it—the question of worldliness, the being-in-the-world.This is a theme I have been grappling with in my own work, mindful ofthe fact that to write the world from Africa or to write Africa into theworld or as a fragment thereof is a compelling, exhilarating, and, most ofthe time, perplexing task.At the time Body of Power was published, one of the dominant ways of

accounting for the African present was presentism. Presentism was neither amethod nor a theory. It was a way of defining and reading African life formsthat relied on a series of anecdotes and negative statements or simplyturned to statistical indices to measure the gap between what Africa wasand what we were told it ought to be. This way of reading always ended upconstructing Africa as a pathological case, as a figure of lack. It was a set ofstatements that told us what Africa was not. It never told us what it actual-ly was. In that sense—and this the second point—presentism was not aform of knowledge as such; rather it was a model of misrecognition and dis-figuration. It operated by segmentation of time, excision of the past anddeferral of the future. It was not interested in the points of articulation


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between different layers of African social existence. In short, it was as if totheorize the African present required, paradoxically, a shrinking of thesocial and the political and not an expanded idea of these terms or cate-gories. When the social was taken into consideration at all, it was alwaysdefined as “custom” and “tradition”—the routine logic of difference (theyare not like us; we are not the same) and repetition (they have been and willalways remain the same) and the foreclosure of the present as such. Inshort, the belief that when it comes to Africa, there is, strictly speaking,nothing to theorize.For me, it is significant that a few years after the publication of Body of

Power—in fact throughout the 1990s—we witnessed a new impetus in theway Africa was being written in the disciplines of social sciences. This wasespecially the case in anthropology, perhaps in history too, in continentalpolitical science, and, in particular, in the work of the French-speakingscholars writing within the paradigm of le politique par le bas in the jour-nal Politique africaine. Evident in the work of a new generation of scholars,like those in this volume, we see a serious intellectual undertaking whosegoal is to account for the deliberate labor involved in African modes of pro-ducing, inhabiting the historical-political-social-economic, in sustainingsocial-political life and relations, and in constituting the social–politicalself. Africa was no longer described as an object apart from the world or asa failed and incomplete example of something else.By the time we entered into the 1990s, the study of life-forms and life-

worlds in Africa had yielded precious gains in at least four major arenasof social life—struggles for livelihood; the question of singularities(rather than of individuality or individuation); the logics of mobility andmultiplicity (that is, of unfinished series rather than a calculus of counta-ble collections); and the logics of experimentation and compositionalprocesses. These gains included, for instance, an expanded conception ofrationality/subjectivity that was not limited to that of the rational, indi-vidual, self-interested, and risk averse social actor; the realization thatthe self/singular was not only a fiction or artifice or something we cometo believe through habit; that our lives were always in-the-making (thetheme of life as potentiality, a process of fragile actualization); and thatin many ways our lives do acquire a certain unstable consistency even inthe midst of shifts, instability, and volatility.When I started writing On the Postcolony in the early 1990s, I was fully

aware of these gains and I did not take them for granted. On the Postcolony



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builds on these insights while searching for alternative acts of thinking;exploring other ways of speaking; taking seriously the visual, sounds, thesenses, and thinking as philosophically and historically as possible about theprecariousness of life in Africa; the intensive surfaces of power; and the var-ious ways in which events coexist with accidents. I have already said that onecan find the presence of Body of Power in the deep recesses of On thePostcolony. I would now like to expand on this, starting with the question oftime and event so central in both works. Indeed, if the project is to “rethinkAfrica,” or for that matter to write the world from Africa or to write Africainto contemporary social theory, then there is no better starting point thanthe question of time, or to be specific, structures of temporality.And if there is a point Body of Power and On the Postcolony make over

and over again, it is first of all that time is neither uniform, nor homoge-neous. I would add that structures of temporality in colonial and post-colonial conditions are thoroughly entangled with the vicissitudes of theaffective, with the subjective play of desire and uncertainty. In such con-texts, we can only refer to the abstraction of time as a rhetorical figure.For many people caught in the vortex of colonialism and what comesafter, the main indexes of time are the contingent, the ephemeral, thefugitive, and the fortuitous—radical uncertainty and social volatility.Radical changes go hand in hand with various other gradual and subtleshifts, almost imperceptible, and sudden ruptures are deeply embeddedin structures of inertia and the logic of routine and repetition. To accountfor change in such a context is therefore to account for simultaneity, bifur-cation, multiplicity, and concatenation. The task of the critic is thereforeto help us think philosophically about the various ways in which eventscoexist with accidents.The interrogation on time is very much related to the interrogation on

life. I do not mean generic questions such as “What is life?,” “How is itlived?,” “How to live with the dead?,” and so on. I mean, of course, takingseriously the mega-forms and infrastructures of our contemporary life-world—a world of global circulatory systems as Arjun Appadurai puts it—infrastructures such as the regulative structures of the market, mass media,and electronic technology; all of which have acquired a planetary reach,although this reach never evidences the same depth everywhere or pro-duces the same effects everywhere—and here James Ferguson’s GlobalShadows might be useful. The problem, of course, is to uncover the rules,regularities, and reproductive logics that underpin our current condition—


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a condition that is of necessity global, although always global in a variety oflocal ways, shapes, and forms.So, what I have in mind here is really the amount of labor involved in

making life possible, especially in those parts of the world that Comaroffcalls the “shadow” of the global system. I am thinking of the relationbetween intentionality, contingency, and routine in the making of livesunder the shadow of the global system—shadows Africa seems to epitomizein the most dramatic way, precisely as the kolossos of our world. What is thebackdrop against which the work of production or maintenance of life or ofa semblance of life is done? What are the materials that individuals workfrom, draw on, might even take for granted, in any case, consistently use?The other thing I have in mind Arjun Appadurai has expressed in the

most eloquent terms when he defines life, especially the life of the poor, asthe effort to produce, if not the illusion, then the sense of stability, or con-tinuity, or something like permanence in the face of the known temporari-ness or volatility of almost all the arrangements of social existence. Indeed,the question of temporariness has been central to recent efforts to accountfor life-forms and life-worlds in Africa. For me, one of the most brutaleffects of neo-liberalism in Africa is the generalization and radicalization ofa condition of temporariness. Appadurai is right when he argues that forthe poor, many things in life have a temporary quality—not only physicaland spatial resources, but also social, political, and moral relations. Whathe says about the poor in Mumbai—the fact that the social energy of thepoor and his or her personal creativity is devoted to producing a sense ofpermanence—is true for many people in Africa.It wasn’t always like that. But clearly, now, there is no way we can the-

orize the present if we do not take into consideration the fact that formany people the struggle to be alive is the same as the struggle againstthe constant corrosion of the present, both by change and by uncertain-ty, as Appadurai rightly argues—especially when he ties up the struggleagainst the constant corrosion of the present with the work of producingone’s own humanity in the face of powerful dehumanizing and, at times,abstract and invisible forces.Now, I would like to suggest that the notion of “temporariness”—or the

fact or condition of temporariness which is a central feature of the neo-lib-eral age especially for those who live in the “shadow of the world system”—this notion has an heuristic or hermeneutical dimension too. In Africa inparticular, temporariness can be described as the encounter—a very regu-



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lar occurrence—with what we cannot yet determine because it has not yetbecome or will never be definite. It is an encounter with indeterminacy,provisionality, the fugitive, and the contingent. Temporariness is not simplyan effect of life changing rapidly. It also derives from the fact that vastdomains of human struggle and achievement are hardly the object of doc-umentation, archiving, or empirical description—and even less so of satis-factory narrative or interpretive understanding. It has to do with the colos-sal amount of things we literally do not know. It is also—as shown in thebest of current history and anthropology of African life forms—that uncer-tainty and turbulence, instability and unpredictability, rapid, chronic, andmultidirectional shifts are the social and cultural forms taken, in manyinstances, by daily experience.Then there is the question of labor which, at least in the history of cap-

italism in South Africa, cannot be unlinked from the histories of race and ofthe body—especially the black body, the body that is at the same time abody and a commodity, but a body-commodity which enters in to the realmof capital under the paradoxical sign of the superfluous—superfluity[WORD?]. But what does the superfluous designate? In the history of raceand capital in South Africa, the superfluous means, on the one hand, thevalorization of black labor-power, and on the other hand, its dispensabili-ty—the dialectics of valuation and dissipation, indispensability and expend-ability. It seems to me that this dialectic has been radicalized in this neo-liberal moment. The dialectics of expendability and indispensability havebeen radicalized in the sense that today many people are no longer indis-pensable specimens. Capitalism, in its present, form might need the territo-ry they inhabit, their natural resources (diamonds, gold, platinum, dia-monds, and so on), their forests, even their wildlife. But it doesn’t needthem as persons. Not long ago, the drama was to be exploited and the hori-zon of liberation consisted in freeing oneself from exploitation. Today, thetragedy is not to be exploited, but to be utterly deprived of the basic meansto move, to partake of the general distribution of things and resources nec-essary to produce a semblance of life. The tragedy is to not be able toescape the traps of temporariness.Rethinking Africa is at once a political, an ethico-moral, and an intel-

lectual project. But that’s not all. As I have already said, it is also a com-plex, irritating, and exhilarating enterprise. It seems to me that part ofthe difficulty in rethinking Africa has to do on the one hand with theimpact of, and the persistence of developmentalism and its corollary pre-


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sentism—two instrumental ways of viewing the world which we find notonly in African state official discourses, discourses of international finan-cial institutions, and discourses of NGOs, but also the discourses of thosewho oppose those policies and, of course, in the kinds of discourse on“relevance” that we hear repeatedly in South Africa.But more critically, it seems to me that the difficulty has to do with

the crisis of language. The crisis of language—and I mean language herein the deepest philosophical sense—when it comes to matters African, itis almost as if our language is afflicted by a hole right at its center. Let’scall it the night of language, the sleep of language. When it comes to mat-ters African, our language always seems to hollow out the experience itis called upon to represent and to bring to life. Until we resolve this cri-sis of our language, we won’t be able to bring Africa back to life. In anycase, writing the world from Africa, is how I understand the project ofcritique—to bring back to life that which is asleep, that which has beenput to sleep; to bring back to life what is threatened over a long periodof time by the forces of the night, the forces of death. And indeed,African history as a whole can be read from that vantage point. And whenI say “African history,” I include in it the history of African people, thedispersal of African people across our planet. So it seems to me that thisis why we won’t be able to rethink Africa without regenerating languageitself, expanding the dictionary, confronting the question of the diction-ary. And one way of expanding the dictionary, and it seems to me reallythis is part of what Jean and John Comaroff are doing, is to allow for asmany forms of criticism as possible—prophetic, apocalyptic, pictorial,musical, poetic, oneiric.So what I’m saying is that multiple languages have to be brought to bear

on the task of bringing Africa back to life in contemporary theorizing—awakening these sleeping bodies, in a kind of linguistic epiphany thatwould incite us to start asking different questions or even old ones anew,hearing something different, speaking in tongues, if you wish. Or in anycase, in a language we never imagined we could ever practice. So I am call-ing for a kind of glossolalia—by which I do not simply mean a matter ofstylistics, but a new, radical form of criticism that is required by the merefact of our sharing this world; a world that is, as a matter of fact, a multi-plicity of worlds and of interlaced boundaries. I have said that, for me, thisis a political project. It’s also an aesthetic project, because politics withoutaesthetics leads nowhere.



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Now, two brief comments and I will stop. As Jesse Shipley has pointedout (this volume), a re-examination of Body of Power raises the questionof how to frame “the neo-liberal moment.” What is it that “the neo-liber-al” allows us to think about? And what is it that it does not allow us tothink? What it doesn’t allow us to think is what I would call the concate-nation of different ages of capital; the entanglement of different tempo-ralities of capital, some of which, of course are neo-liberal, some otherswhich reinforce the neo-liberal logics, some of which temper them, keepthem in check, defeat them momentarily, if only to reappear somewhereelse with vengeance. If we knock it down here, it reappears somewhereelse. And the way in which you knock it down, in fact, only propels it indirections it itself didn’t even envisage.I would for instance be reluctant to say that South Africa is entirely

operating under the sign of neo-liberalism. Of course, there are aspects ofit that are very much so. But at the same time, this is probably the lastcountry in the world to experience the invention of the welfare state, andI am not simply referring to the 70-80 billion rands spent every year onsocial grants and all sorts of poverty alleviation programs. I have in mindthe kinds of positions being examined at a very high level for institution-alizing, for instance, an entire social security system, but which are alsonot in contradiction with the rule of capital, as such. Then one has to fac-tor in the simultaneity of this expansion of the welfare state on the onehand and, on the other,the fact that it is happening at a time of high socialvelocity. Rosalind Morris talks of speed on the roads. And we see thatspeed in almost all spheres of South African social life—this element ofhyper-mobility is dramatically expressed through the emergence of a blackmiddle class hungry to consume, willing to contract debt, to spend onhousing, fridges, cars, and all the trappings of a highly consumerist socie-ty—an increasingly privatized society with a very raucous and even unciv-il public sphere. And then one has to look into the contradictory politicaleffects of welfare, consumption, and privation—which themselves are theresult of the displacement of the sites of the political after years of resist-ance. So the political is no longer where it used to be. Welfare and con-sumption are, in any case, the two main technologies of social discipline,if not pacification, that the government is using after the years of mobi-lization to demobilize people—it doesn’t want people to be protesting toomuch. And it seems to me that these are two technologies critical to themaking and un-making of citizenship in South Africa today.


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Let me end by casting a quick eye on the rest of the continent for whileSouth Africa belongs to it, it is not synonymous with the continent. The con-tinent is larger than South Africa. Morris has invited us to take seriously thenotion of “the accident.” It seems to me that there is no accident withoutsome form of collision, even collusion. I see three forms of collision/collu-sion happening in the continent. There is, first of all, the collision/collusionwhen privatization has to be carried out in an environment fundamentallycharacterized by privation and predation. I see a second collision/collusionwhen extraction goes hand in hand with abstraction in a process of mutualconstitution. After all, the places where capital is most prosperous on thecontinent today are extractive enclaves, some of which are totally discon-nected from the hinterland, in some no-where that is unaccountable tonobody. The third instance of collision/collusion comes in the form of a coa-lescence of commerce and militarism. Here, in order to create situations ofmaximum profit, capital and power must manufacture disasters, feed offdisasters and situations of extremity, which then allow for novel forms ofgovernmentality of which humanitarianism is but the most visible. Theseare, in my eyes, some of the formations or the infrastructures of the pres-ent that we have to deal with if we are to fruitfully theorize the contempo-rary in Africa today.

Jean ComaroffIt is an extraordinary privilege to be asked, almost commanded, to goback to an earlier self, one to whom, in a way, one owes a lot, but fromwhom one also feels estranged. The past, after all, is another country. Ilearned a cautionary lesson about anachronism when I went back to thisvolume, which I hadn’t read for ten years. I tried to recapture the burn-ing issues at the time of its writing: what the ontological, intellectual,political, and ethical questions were that drove me to produce this work.Which calls for a difficult act of reconstruction: it is all too easy to lami-nate a text with insights from the present, from a reflective re-appraisalof what that time seems to have been about in its multiple temporali-ties—to evoke Achille Mbembe’s insight above. To read it, in other words,with an eye far removed from the intentions that motivated it. But Iappreciate the call to undertake the task; even more, the care with whichthe people gathered here have read the text. They have offered some gen-erous, redemptive readings here, which I take to be a true gift.



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Let me say a little about what was at stake when I wrote Body of Powerand then move on to the more general, generative questions at issue inrethinking Africa at the present moment. From our present vantage, theearly 1980s exists on the other side of some significant divides, at once con-ceptual and historical. It was a time of high modernity, both for the socialsciences and for South Africa. Although the end was at hand, it did not seemso at the time. South Africa was a singular, late–20th century anachronism:a remaining bastion of formal colonialism, it may have been faltering butit remained unrelenting. Its transition to postcolony came very late, its lib-eration movement still talking the language of anti–colonial struggle in aworld that had passed beyond the binary politics of domination and resist-ance. It would face the task of trying, after apartheid, to make a moderniststate under postmodern conditions. When Derrida visited the country, hecalled it the last modernist utopia. It was in that kind of spirit that many ofus wrote about this “very strange society” in those days. But, in anothersense, this was also, already, a post– modern moment. Reaganomics was ris-ing in America, Thatcherism in England. Margaret Thatcher was wont, prob-ably with intent, to confuse sociology with socialism, a slip that rang clearwarning bells—warning bells that drove us from the British Academy.Thus it was that I came to write Body of Power in America, which had a

less authoritarian, more liberalized academy. At the University of Chicago,we encountered an unusually interdisciplinary environment, althoughAnthropology there was still in the grips of a structuralist hegemony. It alsoremained “on the reservation:” most of our students went off to do field-work in marginal or faraway places. Engagement with mainstream issues inthe world—colonialism, capitalism, class polarization, race, modernity—was scarcely on the agenda. We still worked with a more-or-less exclusivesense of “anthropological” theory and method, derived from a distinctivegenealogy and a concern with small–scale, homogeneous non–Western soci-eties. The reigning paradigm centered on the notion of culture as an order-ing, determining force. Even when processes of the longer–run were takeninto account, the aim was to show how culture triumphed over history.Little attention was paid to conditions of overrule, to processes of culturalfusion or radical change, or to social systems that were open, plural, andinflected by the workings of power, innovation, creativity, resistance.But these things were unavoidable in rural South Africa under high

apartheid. For those caught up in the urgent political compulsions of thatplace and time, it was impossible to separate any fieldsite from the larger


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socio–historical forces acting upon it. What I sought to do in Body of Powerwas to reach out, to open up the unit of analysis, and to engage discoursesthat came from elsewhere—from British cultural studies, from Foucault,Marx, and others—which was regarded then as a risky thing to do. Thepoint was to extend anthropology to take in the dynamics of historicaltransformation and its cultural mediations, the shifting forms of experienceand agency in play. In retrospect, mine was a wildly eclectic endeavor.Mbembe put it generously when he said that the book was an “hospitable”piece of writing. Yet it was driven by the modernist ideal of making connec-tions, of taking account of a larger canvas than the ethnographic gaze couldphysically encompass; in this case, a colonial history that was itself con-tained in a history of capital driven by conflicts of class and empire. Whatis more, the ethical end to which this politics of knowledge was directed—decolonization, long postponed—went unquestioned. This was what set ourcompass as southern African critical scholars.The world looks strikingly different now. Postcoloniality came late to

South Africa. And cataclysmically, along with the other major shifts of thelate-capitalist, post–Cold War era; among them, the end of the Westphalianinternational order and the metamorphosis of the nation-state. These shiftshad an impact on scholarship and its politics. For one thing, they changedthe division of labor among the social sciences and humanities, includingthe place of anthropology within it; for another, they transformed the veryidea of what the study of “society,” “culture,” and “history” is about.Morris’s argument concerning the intervention of accident (infra) is verytimely. Few of us in the early 1980s anticipated any of this. None of us readthe signs leading to the “end of the high modern order”: the fall of theBerlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union, the Iranian revolution, thedemise of apartheid, the erosion of the telos of modernist history; i.e., theepistemic elements of the world that motivated and disciplined the writingof Body of Power. That work, I repeat, was still fueled by a sense of histor-ical determination, one that took for granted what politics, economy, andthe nation-state—all things now radically in question—actually were.Hilton White has asked how we might look at the local without reducing itto a predicate of the over–arching logic of “World History.” How are we toallow particular, grounded histories to tell themselves in ways that capturetheir dynamism from within, their determination from without, and theconnection between the two? These days, the distinction between in andout—like nature and direction of historical determination—is, at once,



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more deeply in doubt andmore unequivocally tied to a “global” story. Whatsome of us were groping towards in the early 1980s appears ever moreself–evident: that anthropology, while distinctive in its orientation, must,like the other human sciences, include itself in a wide-ranging, supra–dis-ciplinary conversation about the means and ends of our knowledge. Wehave all had to open up the explanatory range of our concepts, sometimesby creative experimentation, even hubris. At the qualitative end of thesocial sciences, this has involved a move toward the humanities, away fromscientism and logocentric metanarratives.The late modern moment has also seen a loss of faith in the social as deus

ex machina, as both a source of explanation and a political principle.American anthropology has always been less sociological than its Europeancounterpart. But here, too, the sociological imagination has been signifi-cantly undermined by the rise of neoliberalism, the de–socializing impactof which on Western thought as been palpable. Whether it be Latour’snotion of symmetry or actor–network theory, Schmittian political theology,Lacanian psychoanalysis, or the language of aesthetics or ethical philoso-phy, theory has become a discursive domain of wide-ranging explanatorypermissiveness, much of it way beyond the pursuit of the Durkheimian“social fact.” This has been exhilarating. At the same time, it raises a realproblem for the social sciences: how are we to grasp what has become ofcollective existence, of collective material and imaginative life, in the hyper-mediated world of late capitalism? Those of us schooled in an earliertime—I am a product of 1960s modernity, called back to social realism bythe memory of the political struggles of the late colonial period—remaincommitted to a sociological understanding, albeit revised and expanded, ofhistorico-political processes, not least processes of structural marginaliza-tion or increasing inequality. These are things that have not gone away: theyhave become more complex, seeming at once under-and over-determined.They have expanded in scale in such a way as to implicate forces and actorsoperating in four dimensions across a global world with multiple centersand peripheries. And producing a cacophony of narratives of differentkinds—east and west, south and north—at the same time.Inherent in all this, is the problem of what has become of the political.

Mbembe, famously, was among the first to observe crucial shifts in the pol-itics of the postcolony. In a highly thoughtful review of Body of Power, heargued that, in Africa today, there is no such thing as resistance; that suchmodernist terms—which presume a division between state and society,


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domination and the demos—have little purchase anymore. At the time, hewas speaking from across the postcolonial divide, back to those of us whostill inhabited a world in which the line between domination and resistanceseemed all too real. In fact, it was a world already rapidly becoming post-colonial, in which the sites and sources of governance, and of political sub-jectivity were radically shifting, being “deregulated” and “deterritorial-ized.” One of the insights that Mbembe’s work has brought—the rest of thecontinent was way ahead of us in South Africa in those days—was the needto rethink the nature of the political, as well as the degree to which a mod-ernist history, philosophy, and anthropology was or was not adequate to thecontemporary moment. He called on us to come to terms with the possibil-ity that we had never really, none of us, been modern; that the planet wasmoving towards Africa, becoming postcolonial; that it was not only theSouth African scene that was at stake; that, in the African postcolony wereprefigured processes still only dimly visible elsewhere across the globe.A key to making sense of the world as it has changed since Body of

Power lies in the problem of bringing “the postcolonial” into line with “theneoliberal”—and of situating both in the longer history of capitalistmodernity. South Africa, once again, raises this issue acutely: with the endof apartheid, liberation ran headlong into liberalization, yielding many ofthe paradoxes of the present moment, paradoxes both productive andcounter-productive, material and intellectual. It has become common-place to note that, while we all use the term “neoliberal,” pinning it downand rendering it actual—alike as concrete abstraction and as situatedethnographic fact—calls for a lot more work. To what extent is the rise ofthe neoliberal a “second coming”? Posing the question thus, of course,implies a return to an earlier moment, a first coming. Yet the here-and-now, although it bears recognizable traces, is starkly different from thepast. As Foucault points out, the division presumed by Adam Smithbetween the market and the ethico–political has been eroded. Ours, more-over, is a largely post–proletarian epoch: one which has seen the end ofwage labor in its orthodox sense; one in which workers—scarcely, asMbembe says, fit for exploitation—have been reduced to pure surplus inmany places; one in which there is even nostalgia for the proletarianoppression of earlier times, the times described in Body of Power. How, inthis epoch, do we parse the political?Self-evidently, neoliberalism has not put an end to all labor in its high

modern guise. It has also revised some older forms, like sweat-shops and



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the putting–out system, within an ever more global division of labor.Colonial economies have been replaced by rapacious modes of extraction—we might call them corporatist modern–imperial—whose globally–out-sourced systems of production make the racial capitalism of apartheid lookalmost gentle. It is now well-recognized that a new scramble for Africa isafoot, a new age of adventurism with some old world players and someingenues, especially from Dubai, India, and China. Many of them exploitconditions of deregulation that minimize local accountability and appearinseparable from criminal enterprises: trade in blood diamonds, contra-band substances, protected species, sex workers, and the like. As this sug-gests, we are also witnessing the burgeoning of new kinds of value cre-ation—speculation, service, “non-productive labor”—that require us torethink the very nature of work, ownership, surplus, and class.Understanding the “second coming” of liberalism requires that we addressthe elemental social questions to which it gives rise: What sorts of imagina-tive horizons are opened up in the present moment? How do they affect thelived landscapes of African postcolonies? How is it that, under these condi-tions, there is often a yawning gap between local self–understandings andthe various modes of critical analysis brought to bear on them?This problem of consciousness and exploitation is not new, of course.

Scholars have long asked why working class subjects seem rarely to “rec-ognize” their own immiseration. One clue in South Africa, for instance,lies in the dramatic rise of various sorts of millennial movements,Pentecostal and prosperity gospels, pyramid schemes, and political pop-ulism, all of which address the loss of employment, entitlement, develop-ment, and social ties. Again, none of this is entirely unprecedented, whichraises the question of what precisely is new about it. Are we dealing withdifferences of scale, differences of essence, differences of significationand communication, differences in material conditions? Is it that we areliving with a much more complicated form of capitalism, in which explod-ing financial markets, proliferating highways of electronic circulation,ever longer distanced extraction, and expanding property regimes existalongside more primitive forms of production and accumulation? Sites ofmanufacture and sites of consumption are often far apart now, makingthe trajectories of traveling objects and people appear to be governed bya serendipity that resembles the logic of cargo cults more than it doesrational economies. These things challenge the theoretical apparatus of adiscipline like anthropology—its dictionary, to use Mbembe’s term—and


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its methodology; indeed modernist social thought tout court, and, hence,the intellectual world whence came Body of Power. But, as I have alreadyimplied, they also raise exhilarating possibilities.Let me focus briefly on a few of the empirical problems and analytical

challenges of the moment. It is true: we do need a new lexicon. But we alsoneed to put some older concepts to use again, albeit more imaginatively.For one thing, we require to undertake class analyses on a global scale; yethave little idea how even to begin. I have tried—much of the time in col-laboration with John Comaroff—to broach this sort of issue by identifyingsymptomatic problems and processes that configure social experience, andthe phenomenology of everyday life, in particular times and places, payingclose attention to questions of continuity and breach, uniqueness and gen-erality, theory and method. One example has to do with the “criminalobsessions” gripping the social and political imaginary in so many places.Why does the figure of the criminal, and the metaphysic of disorder ofwhich he is a metonymic displacement, loom so large these days, especial-ly in postcolonies? To be sure, lawlessness has always been the underside ofthe normative. Foucault tells of the “great fear” of the criminal classes in18th century urban France; Engels, Dickens, and Mayhew all wrote reveal-ingly about the forms of crime rampant in the cities of Victorian England.Yet the degree to which the outlaw has come to index of the presence orabsence of social order seems singular in our world, a world in which sov-ereignty rests not in God or divine kings, but in the law. With the erosion offaith in the possibilities of democratic politics, drawing the line betweenlaw and lawlessness is ever more the essence of the political. These days,even warfare is subject to the language of crime, understood in terms oflegitimate violence versus terror. Many have remarked not only on themigration of politics into the domain of jurisprudence, but also on the riseof a new punitiveness in which a Schmittian distinction is made betweenthose inside and outside the garrison state, in which a frontier is thrown upbetween a class of unproductive, useful citizens and a criminalized surplus.This is all of a piece with the issue of fatalism, both metaphysical and

frankly religious. There is growing awareness, in many places, of alate–modern paradox: on one hand, life, being the object of scientific per-fection and humanitarian activism, has never been as precious; yet, on theother, it has become extraordinarily fragile. Not just for those who arekilled, neglected, or left to expire with impunity merely because of who orwhere they are. Also for those willing to subject themselves to, even sacri-



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fice themselves for, various kinds of authoritarianism. This is not unrelatedto the new forms of millennialism, new sorts of theocracy, that haveemerged in Africa and elsewhere in inverse proportion to the waning ofcivil governance, secure citizenship, and regular work. Such convictionsoften crave the sorts of sovereignty and absolutism—like the dominionistpassions of born–again Pentecostals or the populist fervor for Jacob Zumaor Hugo Chavez—that are hard to reconcile with secular law and gover-nance. They also raise many of the analytical challenges of which we havebeen speaking, challenges that arise from novel configurations of space,time, subjectivity, production, sociality.Finally, an issue with which I have been concerned—along with John

Comaroff and some of our students—is the growing salience, and creepingcommodification, of difference–as–identity. With the shifting shape ofnation-states, with transformations in the nature of citizenship, sovereign-ty, governance, and economy, we are witnessing a rise in essentialized, bio-genetic modes of being and belonging. This is linked not merely to the ideaof culture as intellectual property, but also to the notion that ethnicity is aninalienable physical right, determined by DNA, that draws sharp lines ofinclusion and exclusion. Because it is tied thus to “life itself,” ethnic iden-tity is now widely experienced as more “real” than civic citizenship, andethnic groups and are increasingly incorporating themselves, definingmembers as shareholders, and treating their vernacular knowledge, prac-tices, and products as natural copy– righted commodities to be transactedin the market. Rather than simply banalizing culture, or calling into ques-tion its authenticity, this process it often tied into emergent forms of self-hood, collective revival, political assertion. In other words, rather than sur-vive by resisting commodification, culture and its producers may thrive, andbe legitimated, through the market. Again, this is not altogether new. Still,the open congress between culture and capital is, at least for modernistanthropologists, counter–intuitive. It bespeaks an ever closer integration ofidentity, the market, changing patterns of accumulation and circulation,and transformations in the nature of political subjectivity.

* * * * *

A question has been posed about the disappearance of “ideology” from thediscourse of the social sciences. John Comaroff and I have noted the shift,in South Africa, from ideology to ID-ology, the –ology of identity. The rise ofethnic identitarianism is doubly ironic here. Not only does it evoke all the


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ghosts of the apartheid past, but the African National Congress (ANC) cameto power in the early 1990s with a civic nationalist, post-cultural stance;ethno-nationalism was confined to the Inkatha Freedom Party inKwaZulu–Natal and the White right. Since then, government itself has beendrawn inexorably into a politics of indigeneity, customary law, and “tradi-tion.” In so doing, it has had to confront the stubborn contradictions thathave surfaced between cultural difference, and universal citizenship as laiddown in the country’s famously liberal modernist constitution.Interesting in all this is that identity, in its contemporary form, has two

dimensions to it. One is the elective, based on a notion of culture as thecollective creation of free subjects. The other is the essentialist; it pre-sumes an ontology based, if not on race per se, then on substance, onblood and genes. In respect of the latter, there is a widespread perceptionabroad that ethnic belonging derives from something ineffable, some-thing that goes beyond the social, the historical, and the constructed.This, I believe, is owed to the fact that the nation-state has lost its abilityto presume or compel a sense of membership—to the degree that it everhad it. Perhaps we have been inhabiting an anachronism, a chimera even.We look back to the world described by Benedict Anderson in ImaginedCommunities (1983) and think that, once upon a time, the polity wasfounded on horizontal fraternity. Now it is riven by difference. In fact,imagined national communities were never homogenous. But the fictionwas sustainable. It is less so today. The capacity to produce a collectivesense of citizenship has waned in South Africa as elsewhere. Recentresearch shows that the vast majority of people regard other identities—like religion or ethnicity—as more salient to them; neither class nornationalism figure high on the list.Just as ID–ology has ever more traction in the world we have been

describing, so ideology has less. For one thing, it is difficult, in that world,to posit a coherent relationship between ideas and any given social order.What is more, whether we see it as a partisan representation of the world,as false consciousness, as a “model of or for” a given social reality, the con-cept tends to presume the possibility of establishing the truth-value ofthose ideas in relation to a particular set of interests. It also implies a visionof society and history that holds a place for consciousness, critique, andagency; and for a form of world–making under intentional human control.None of these things has much purchase any more in either public or schol-arly discourse. The waning of the image of a tractable social universe, sub-



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ject to human intervention, has to do with the erosion of the forms of laborand of the communities of participation that made this humanist visionplausible in the first place; also of national economies in which class rela-tions were negotiated inside a territorial framework perceived as “society.”The end of ideology, in short, bespeaks an undermining of social imaginary,of the plausability of a world of “social facts.” ID–ology, on the other hand,invokes a sense of searching—in South Africa as elsewhere—for the real,for the attainable, for embodied being, for the possibility of pure affect.Also for something that is not a bloodless “–ism.” It is common these daysfor people to say, “I put no faith in ‘–isms.’ I’m not convinced by them. WhatI really feel is…” The very logic of identity, in sum, eschews the form ofabstraction that would reduce ideas to “ideology.”The concept of ideology may have withered under the impact of funda-

mental changes in economy, society, and polity. But, in my view at least, itstill has its uses in the production of a critical social science. True, the coor-dinates of the universe in which the concept first emerged have been dra-matically recast in recent times; gone may be its reified modes of represent-ing, and conjuring with, “social reality,” its structures of inequality, itslineaments of power; anachronistic may be the forms of political struggleand social criticism in which it was most cogently invoked. Nonetheless, asa call to critique, the very term “ideology” reminds us to insist on interro-gating the social—its sustained patterns of exclusion and immiseration, itsrendering disposable of huge numbers of people, its ever more cynicaldeployments of rhetorical “spin,” its surrendering to capital the power tomake the world in its image—when the history of the present conduces tomake it disappear forever. All the more so as the impetus for critiquemigrates elsewhere: primarily into a concern with infractions of identity—itself a term that remains largely undeconstructed—made manifest instates of injury, in rights unrealized, in demands and desires unsatisfied.

Achille MbembeJean Comaroff is right. The impetus for critique has migrated into arenewed concern with juridical and ethical questions—the question ofviolence and the law for instance, a renewed critique of religion as a cri-tique of the political, matters of sacrifice and martyrdom, election andsalvation, atonement and forgiveness, or for that matter, hope, justice,and the future. It seems to me that there has been a dramatic turn to


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ethico-juridical reason, especially during the last quarter of the 20th cen-tury and this turn has happened at the same time as capitalism’s triumphas a religion—to use Benjamin’s terminology—became more and moreuncontestable. This, it seems to me, is what partly explains our currentobsession with the theologico-polical.Otherwise I think what made categories such as “class” and “ ideology”

so powerful in an earlier age was the fact that these categories functionedas another name for the future—the future as a political question or asthe term for the struggle to produce a meaningful life. The problem todayis that the horizon of the future has been replaced by something else. If Ilook at South Africa for instance, the weakening of “class” and “ ideology”has to do with the fact that the process of producing life tends to take theform of a struggle to make it from today to tomorrow; the boundary fromtoday to tomorrow being itself always very tenuous. Indeed, for too manypeople in South Africa to cross the boundary from today to tomorrow (andI mean this in a literal sense) can never really be taken for granted. Infact, it is eminently hazardous, risky—for to be alive is to constantly be atrisk; to be alive is to constantly have to take risks because the penalty fornot taking risks is to not be able to make it from today to tomorrow.On the other hand, the future cannot be a question unless an interroga-

tion concerning the future simultaneously opens the possibility of reinven-tion of our sense of the past; unless interrogating the future helps us toreflect critically on some figure of the present—the present not necessarilyas a temporal unit inserted between the past and the future, but preciselyas that vulnerable space, that precarious and elusive entry-point throughwhich, hopefully—and I would like to emphasize the element of hope—aradically different temporal experience might make its appearance; in fact,the hope that we might bring this radically different temporal experienceinto being as a concrete social possibility, as a systemic modification in thelogic of our social life, in the logic of our being-in-common as humanbeings. I think this is part of what historically gave a category such as“class” its power and this is no longer the case.What strikes me now is the “ liquid” character both of the present and

of the future, their dizziness, their mirage-like qualities, the weakness inour grip on the future in particular. And I wonder whether there is directrelationship between the liquidity of the present and the overwhelmingfeeling, right now in South Africa for instance, of the elusiveness of thefuture—and therefore the receding force of class and ideology, the fore-



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closure of any plausible form of radical politics. What is striking is thestructural ambiguity of the times we live in and the increasing difficultyof the place we find ourselves in to respond to a proper name—a namein the proper sense of the term, that is, an Idea. I do not even mean a uni-versal Idea, I mean just something that could be called an Idea, some-thing that could be recognized as an Idea; that is, a future beyondreceived narratives because a thoroughgoing reinvention of our sense ofour past has truly taken place.So, today in this place called South Africa and in the aftermath of class

identifications, we find many people yearning for—I wouldn’t say thepast, or a return to “the tradition” as such although this is part of it—something they can recognize as stable, as common sense, since commonsense is to a certain extent predicated on the belief in the stability of real-ity, or at least some stability in the real. They are yearning for some senseof tangible certainty and solidity—something we can call “ foundational”if such a term had not been the object of so much confusion. They areyearning for some sense of originary simplicity, something unmixed,somehow pure. And they know from experience that the end of apartheidand the advent of democracy has not provided that simplicity. If anything,democracy has rendered life even more complex than before. Democracyis literally undermining this sense of simplicity, stability, tangibility, solid-ity, and predictability.So, we live here now in a context in which very few are willing to swear

that they indeed unconditionally count on the solidity of the present andon the solidity of this place. In fact, many live as if the present, unexpect-edly, had betrayed them—and by “the present,” I also mean “democracy.”They live as if democracy had betrayed them, as if “the law” is betrayingthem; the paramount law, the Constitution, included.It therefore seems to me that in this context (which might be specific

to South Africa or, for that matter, just a figment of my own imagination),any reflection on the crisis of “class” and “ ideology” has to start with anexamination of this shattering experience—what it means to have beenbetrayed by the present, by the law, by the Constitution, by democracy, andby the future altogether.Here, I would like to venture three quick observations that all relate to

what, politically, might be at stake in this feeling of having been betrayedby the present, by the law, by the Constitution, and by democracy—andwhat consequences this sense of betrayal entails for our imagination of the


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future, the future of “class,” and the future of whatever we might want tocall “radical politics.”First, this sense of betrayal is a direct result of a certain kind of politics

that strives on an over-reliance on over-simplified narratives and concep-tions of time. And when I say over-simplified narratives, I include those nar-ratives whose fundamental decisions turn on whether to judge a givendevelopment, a given event, or set of events as a break with what preced-ed it, or to read this or that seemingly novel motif as standing in deepercontinuity and consonance with earlier preoccupations and procedures. Iguess some of what I am suggesting is that at the basis of every form of pol-itics (radical or not), there is a way of reading time that combines the ration-al, the para-rational, affects, passions, sentiments, and emotions.In this regard, it appears to me that the essential quality of the times

we live in, which urgently calls for both explanation and interpretation—and therefore for a different way of imagining the future of radicality—isthe interlocking of multiple durées; the overlapping of various duréeswithin our single social present. Or, more concretely, here in South Africa,the constant re-apparition of the past in almost every single act that aimsat bringing a different future into being; the spectrality of a past some(and not only whites) would like to believe that it continues to, or can con-tinue to, be somehow possible in its very impossibility; the reality, formany people (and not only blacks), that too much has changed and yet notenough has changed; the feeling (especially among the poor) that they arenow not merely deprived of wealth and power, but even of life possibili-ties as such. And then of course, throughout the entire society, the emer-gence of something difficult to name, but something largely shared,something that looks like ressentiment or for that matter envy, greed, nox-ious nostalgia, fear, or in any case the surge of “primal passions,” some ofthem “class passions” and others “race passions,” “gender passions;” andthe dramatic shortening of the distance between ressentiment and envy,envy and hatred; hatred of the other and self-hatred; the belief that inorder to further one’s claims, whether these are legitimate or not, it isbetter and more efficient to resort to violence rather than to invoke thelaw—this accelerated turn to an everyday politics of expediency ratherthan a demanding, disciplined politics of principle—an everyday politicsof expediency that can only be sustained if we keep disguising dead par-adigms, keeping them alive, keeping faith with them in a sterile repeti-tion—the inability to open freedom onto the un-chartered territories of



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the future. So, a weakening of class affiliations as a result of the shift fromthe politics of radicality to the politics of expediency.Second, it seems to me that underpinning the everyday politics of expe-

diency is the fact that we are faced with not only too many questions with-out answers, but also too many answers without questions. We are facedwith the quasi-disappearance of argument, the privileging of narratives ofconviction, and sincerity over argument; the privileging of self-justifyingstatements over propositions. We are faced with the increasing difficulty, ifnot impossibility to raise certain problems as political problems as such andin their own right—the fact that certain problems can only surface as spec-tral problems, as invisible abstractions.To give you another example from South Africa—this is a place where

death constantly surrounds us, taunts us, and haunts the majority of thepeople in this country. This country is the epicenter of one of the most dra-matic demographic shifts in recent history, caused by the HIV-AIDS epidem-ic. Thousand of families are being decimated. Thousands of children havebeen forced to become heads of households. Last year alone, more than18,000 people were killed by criminals. The same number of people diedon the roads. The number of women raped in the country is in the order ofthousands. So, judging by these figures alone, we can very much say that welive in a disaster zone, in a war zone. A new kind of war is going on here: awar that has the qualities of a civil war, a race war, a gender war, a classwar, a molecular war. Now, why is it that this objective disaster is not seenas a disaster at all; that this war is not seen as a war at all; that this war andthis disaster can only be talked about as spectral?But the point I would really like to make, which I would hope to be cen-

tral to our politics in this country today—politics as such, but also our intel-lectual and cultural politics—this point which one hears if only one listensto what is being said—this point has to do with an expression I often hearhere and elsewhere in Africa: “being alive,” “to live really;” “to live final-ly.” It seems to me that there has been a de-linking of “class” and “ideolo-gy” with such vital preoccupations.In any case, crucial, at least in my mind, is the fact that in the midst of

some of the events I have evoked, many have the feeling that they have notreally lived, not yet lived or fulfilled their lives; that they might not ormight never really fulfill their lives; that their lives will always be somewhattruncated in a country organized to deprive them of the satisfaction oflearning how to live finally—a country that deprives them not only in the


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past, but even now, under this democratic dispensation, after the negotiat-ed settlement. This enigmatic doubt, anxiety, uncertainty is both social/his-torical and existential. As a category, “class” does not capture this complex-ity—the ghost in life; the ghost of life; a life that has been made to neverachieve the status neither of a question, nor of an answer and which, forthat matter, cannot be accounted for.Finally, the pain of disappointment and the sharp experience of defeat,

of palpable powerlessness, or at least of dashed hopes and impossibility wewitness in the present moment. Radical change seems more and moreunthinkable, except under the sign of total unruliness. What remains, inthis context, is the attempt to avoid closure; to make sure that so-calledalternative imaginations avoid becoming official, recognized institutionallanguages in their own right; that they always remain fragments.This having been said, it is clear that South Africa is a fragile experi-

ment. If the South African experiment fails, then really there is no hopefor the African continent. So, what I am saying is that there is no way cat-egories such as “class” will be imbued with a new life if their re-figurationdoes not go hand in hand with a new politics of the future in conditionsof hightened temporariness.

Jean ComaroffI agree. There is a deep sense of the inseparability of the political from thetheological in much of Africa today. A researcher working in a poor blackpart of Cape Town with people who participated in an AIDS project—itinvolved community service in return for treatment—noted that even thosewith no religious affiliation speak the Pentecostal language of rebirth.Furthermore, many talk of being “reborn into ARVs” [anti–retroviral drugs].The lexicon of redemption travels in extraordinary ways and provides a pos-itive idiom for social regeneration—even in the more mercenary Christianmovements, the so-called “prosperity gospel churches.” This kind of eman-cipatory language, in the absence of others, gives people terms with whichto aspire, to think about futurity, to constitute the self. Writers like AntonBloch once called on us to find a utopian impetus in unlikely places. Thesepopular discourses help us trace out the connective tissue that binds togeth-er those who seek some form of salvation. Which is itself an interesting newangle to explore: the new species of social connectedness made possible bythe semiotics of faith. Given that there are not many other wells of moral



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discourse on this terrain, this language bears a considerable amount of thetraffic, serving as an idiom for ever wider horizons of everyday existence—as did the lexicon of African Independent churches in colonial times, if inslightly different ways. On the other hand, languages of faith are less con-ducive to elaborating ideologies, in the secular modernist sense, than toframing convictions—which are not the same thing.The other challenge here is to push the metaphor of glossolalia, as

Mbembe has done, to convey something of the scholarly insights that areemerging from postcolonial Africa. Universities there are seriously threat-ened, much more so than in the US. At the same time, things happen inthem that are sometimes extraordinarily exciting, perhaps because thereis a sense—particularly in South Africa—that we are being released from,and moving beyond, received orthodoxies. For a new generation of for-merly excluded scholars, the struggle era, however worthy, is over. Thereare fresh possibilities, formerly forbidden intellectual terrains—terrainsbeyond social realism and resistance ideologies—to be explored. Like theheady sense of mobility that followed the lifting of apartheid restrictions,there is a feeling, to invoke the metaphor Morris develops (see this vol-ume), that we can “drive anywhere” into the realm of new ideas. Thesescholars are experimenting with all kinds of things—psychoanalysis, liter-ary criticism, theology, poststructuralism, queer theory—sometimes inwild, heady, but highly creative ways. With real payoffs. Some of the mostinteresting social theory about right now comes from places like this. Inpart, it is because of the nature of the historical moment, in part becauseof the challenges and contradictions with which they, we, live so intense-ly on the continent: the simultaneous possibilities and impossibilities,enfranchisement and exclusion with which everyone has to deal. The con-catenations of these things, of the promise and the disappointment, rubup against each other so tangibly as to generate friction, desperation, vio-lence, and criminal economies—but also desperate, joyful creativity, aspi-ration, and innovative social thinking. The north feeds, often parasitical-ly, often unconsciously, off this passionate energy and despair, not leastat the heart of the American academy.


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Africa in Theory: A Conversation Between Jean Comaroff and Achille Mbembe

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