Post Colonial Theory and the 'Post-' Condition

Abstract

The issue of 'postcolonial theory' shall detain us at some length presently. So, let me start by reflecting on the other term in the title of the discussion at hand: the Post Condition. The phrase itself is taken from Niethammer whose book on the past careers of the concept of 'posthistory' as published in Hamburg barely a few months after Francis Fukuyama, the philosopher from Rand Corporation, published his famous essay which he then went on to revise and expand into the even more famous book that outlines his own tamer version of Kojeve's philosophically magisterial statement on fin de l'histoire. In political persuasion, philosophical stance and structure of argument, the two authors could hardly be more dissimilar. It is uncanny, therefore, that both should have been concerned - Fukuyama as advocate, Niethammer from a position at once antagonistic and nuanced - with those strands in European intellectual history which have been fond of announcing that History has already ended. Since we hear so much these days about the End of History and its 'metanarratives of emancipation' - from Fukuyama in one register, but in many more registers from postmodernist, deconstructivist and postcolonialist positions - it might be useful to begin by reflecting briefly on some of the political origins of this postist philosophical reflex.