From Indifference to Difference: Theorizing Emancipation through Sylvia Wynter and Alain Badiou

In this project I argue that Alain Badious theory of emancipation fails to properly account for racial and racialized subjects as well as racial emancipation. All particularities, including race, must be subtracted from emancipatory movements and this is central to his conception of politics. On this view, racial identities are considered divisive and arise merely as the result of hierarchical structures. For these reasons, in Badious account, no conception of racialized subjecthood can provide the conditions for universal emancipation.

I turn to two examples in order to demonstrate several unintended consequences of Badious theory of emancipation: the Ngritude movement (1930s-1940s) and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). According to Badiou, Ngritude fails to be a political movement because it retains a focus on race. While he claims that it is an important cultural movement, the conditions for it to become a political movement would require that Ngritude writers and artists move beyond racial identity so that they can affirm a universal subject position. I argue that Badiou's discussion of Ngritude mirrors that of Jean-Paul Sartres discussion of Ngritude in Black Orpheus (1948) a position that has been critiqued by various critical race theorists, including Frantz Fanon, Kathryn Gines, and Robert Bernasconi. Second, I discuss how Badious theory of emancipation would apply to the Haitian Revolution. Within his framework, the Haitian Revolution could only be considered political if its adherents shifted their focus away from race. However, I argue that race is a central and defining feature of this revolution, and that it ought to be understood as a political emancipatory movement. As a result, the failure of Badious political theory to account for the Haitian Revolution in this way demonstrates a limitation of his theory of emancipation.

This project then culminates in a discussion of the decolonial project of Sylvia Wynter, and I propose that her work addresses the limitations of Badious political theory. In particular, I develop her view of a pluri-conceptual theory of emancipation developed from the work of C. L. R. James that argues that particular identities, such as race, need not be subtracted from a theory of emancipation.