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88 Strategies for “constructing belief” in the african Public Sphere “The Colonization of the Lifeworld” Nonidentity has been perpetually stifled in africa by discourses and practices of repression. research is needed to show how the political dimension affects the concept of possibility in critical Theory and in the confrontation between african modernity and its possibilities. further, the epistemo-political importance of such an inquiry must be demonstrated. finally, given the multiplicity of parameters that may be generated by every discourse on the political domain or political practice, we must identify the site from which our own interrogation of african political reality will emerge. what would justify an analysis of african politics with respect to the concept of possibility in critical Theory? for starters, the major task of critical theory (by contrast to traditional theory) is to connect the discriminating mission of reason, emptied of its formalist/instrumental aspect, with the historical content of human actions. The relation of reason to history requires an inquiry into the ways rationality is deformed in political life. Moreover, speaking about rationality in politics supposes putting into perspective the multiple rationalizations by which repression appears and becomes permanent. critical Theory occupies itself with thinking about domination, beginning from the domination of the concept, and through the immediacy of relations, it reveals the multiple mediations by which law is elaborated, inscribed, subscribed to, and proclaimed. critical Theory aims to break down surface coherence so that a future both oncoming and be-coming can sprout from between the cracks. but if such an analysis of african political reality is so meaningful, this is only because the scrambling of codes, Strategies for “Constructing Belief” in the African Public Sphere | 89 the debasement of language, and the inflation of texts have become normal practices in africa. These problems result from the heritage of western bureaucracy, but also from longstanding attachment to dogmatic practices. To think the problem of the possible and to ask how subjects relate to the law seems in keeping with the lines sketched out by critical Theory. but we must note a paradox that risks seducing us into collusion with the eradication of possibility in african politics. our research is oriented by a working hypothesis —namely, african political reality is invested with the discourse of identity. but we confront a question: how can politics, the art of the possible par excellence, at the same time be a discourse of identity—how to resolve the paradox that possibility is lacking in an art of the possible? There is an opportunistic use of the term “possible” that justifies profit-seeking and last-minute social climbing, in addition to a dialectical use that makes the term into a heuristic category for pursuing what is not-yet developed or thought. once this distinction has been noted, it becomes legitimate to circumscribe the site of our interrogation. The imposition of self-generating and regulative texts, bureaucracy and its corridors (where all the conscripts learn to lie easily to themselves), the myth of the rationality and asexuality of laws invite a political analysis of africa from the point of view of its participants’ psychic investments. This analysis will be, more specifically , a pathetics of politics, examining in large part the forms of pathos by which people enter into the process of becoming-slave. in other words, our interrogation is not situated on the plane of constitutional analysis, but on the plane of reading african politics from the angle of the imaginary. it will be a matter of seeing the relationships between politics and the problem of desire. relations within which one can examine the reproduction of power; but “how could power reproduce itself, without sexuality being involved? where there is reproduction, there is sex.”1 it would therefore be important to inspect the relations that sexuality might entertain with politics in africa. The importance of this approach is that it lets us see the diverse sublimations and repressive desublimations in black africa, beyond all the forms of denial. Politics, sexuality, and desire—the focus of this research—touch on the general regime of belief.2 and when we speak of belief, we do not mean this in the narrow sense of religious belief, but of the investment by which the imaginary is coupled to the law. To interrogate the sexual kernel of order also means reading the social hieroglyphs by which african (or other) political institutions use and produce credulity, homogeneity, and stability. The social hieroglyphs in question are the “mythemes” by...

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