Analysing Political Subjectivities: Naming the Post-developmental State in Africa Today

Abstract

Politics, whether that of the state or that constituted beyond the state, must be analysed as thought, as subjectivity. This article proposes to do so in connection with state politics in Africa since independence. It consists of a brief theoretical justification for such a perspective, a methodological stress on the process of elucidating the names around which such politics is deployed, and an application of these conceptions to the politics of the post-colonial African state. It shows that two different forms of state can be elucidated, namely a ‘developmental state’ form in which parties play a subjective role of mobilizing popular political subjectivities within the state, and a ‘post-developmental’ state form, hegemonic today, in which a consensus is established between state and civil society organizations. In either case the sites of alternative politics to these state political sequences which arise beyond state subjectivity are briefly elucidated.