ABSTRACT
The end of the West in the late 1980s was paradoxically concealed by the premature assumption of postcoloniality since the late 1940s, under which rubric the West continued its phantom force. The end of European colonialism had given the false impression of the end of the colonial condition and the colonized person with the false down of the postcolonial person. But the end of colonialism was not the end of the colonial person, so far as the West remained the condito sine qua non of thinking the postcolonial. The false dawn of the postcolonial person was a distraction from the continued condition of coloniality in moral and material terms, the mental condition of an arrested imagination sustaining the posttraumatic stress syndrome of coloniality. The death knell of the colonial condition came from the imperial site itself. The implosion of the West is now coterminous with the exhaustion of the Islamism that it had historically occasioned and epistemically sustained.
