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WAITING ON THE END OF THE WORLD? 209

exists a gap through which much of postwar critical European thought has
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travelled. Viewed from the other side of the Channel, and of the Atlantic,
faith in the ultimate transparency of language can be considered to mark a
refusal to investigate our being in the very constitution of being (language).
To cling to the logic of linguistics and abhor ambiguity is to ignore the
shadows, the unknown paths and openings in language, sometimes also the
space of terror, in order to relentlessly reduce the world to an illusory
semantic unity. The instance of alterity, and the potential ethical opening it
installs in the languages of our being, is here nullified in the closed
economy of a unilateral and universal reason.
But lest this opening appears as yet one more recuperation of the West,
the final gesture drawn from the energies of its dissipation, where and how
we move in this gap, this interval, where we go is not solely dependent
upon this rent in occidental thought as though such an ‘origin’ could claim
language, and the critical disposition of being, as its property. For this is
only one ‘cut’, one ‘version’, itself perhaps only a displaced disruption of a
diverse ‘wordling of the world’ (Heidegger) in which the injections of
feminism, the histories of ethnic positionalities and the interruptions of
postcoloniality have become the insistent markers of a diverse and
differential inhabitation of such languages. In particular, the shift from
‘Third World’ criticism to ‘postcoloniality’ invokes an explicit critique of
the spatial metaphors and the temporal axis employed in ‘First World’
discourses. Whereas the former designation was intended to signal both
spatial and temporal distance—‘out there’ and ‘back there’—the post-
colonial perspective insists, in both spatial and temporal terms, that the
‘other’ world is ‘in here’. That heterogeneous other world, with all its
particular differences and distinctions, is integral to what the West refers to
as ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’; it contributes directly in its labour and being
exploited, certainly, but also in its modalities and aesthetics, in its
immediacy and presence, to constituting the languages and possibilities of
the West and their distillation into the world. Clearly, this is not to claim
and defend the ‘Third World’ as a separate or autonomous reality, but is
rather to attempt the more ambitious and decisive task of rewriting the
hegemonic accounting of time (history), and its spatial distribution of
knowledge (power), that previously produced and positioned the ‘Third
World’ as a necessary effect of its languages.
What can be registered at this point, as we negotiate our diverse ways in
these languages, is that resisting and rewriting them can no longer appeal
to the securities of stable truth or fixed identity. These, too, are among the
interrupted and discontinued narratives of the West. The desire for the
transparent logic of a radically alternative ontology, even when voiced in
the name of the previously excluded, defeated and marginalized, is a
chimera that can only provide the consolatory comfort of an ineffectual
political ‘correctness’. To repudiate the illusory resolution of a ready-made