Chapter Ten: The End of the West

Abstract

The formation of the cohesive picture in a broken mirror I suggested in the previous chapter is predicated on the fact of an implosion of “the West” as an absolute and absolutist metaphor that had enabled all its binaries and can no longer do so. “The West” was the totalizing metaphor of European colonial modernity that wreaked havoc around the world as it enabled a dominant elite who saw the world in a Hegelian trajectory that saw the world at large as the infancy of the European Geist. That totalizing metaphor is no more, and in this chapter, I will now turn my attention to a detailed consideration of how “the West” as the defining metaphor of capitalist (and colonial) modernity has finally imploded. This close reading is necessary if we are to see the rebirth of the nation in terms no longer determined by the modus operandi of colonial modernity that was the societal predicate for the rise of a postcolonial reason that had coupled the nation and the state in a fateful delusion.