ABSTRACT
When the French philosopher Michel Foucault introduced the book that established his international reputation, Les mots et les choses, he explained that it had its origins in a passage from an essay by the Argentinian novelist Juan Luis Borges. As Foucault realised, our incomprehension arises rather from the series in which they are all placed together. In short, it is not the spaces but the spacings that make this 'unthinkable'. Even those Muslims who disagreed with bin Laden and condemned what happened on September 11 are incarcerated with the terrorists in a monolithic super-organic 'culture' that serves only to reinforce 'hostility, distrust and hatred of the West' and to 'fuel fanaticism'. The space of potential is always conditional, always precarious, but every performance of the colonial present carries within it the possibility of undoing its enclosures and approaching closer to the horizon of the postcolonial.
