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The question of postcolonialism is a question that the Western world asks within its own problematic of the globalization of its model of democracy. But isn't democracy one now, following the shattering collapse of the socialist model? This is the most general assumption, in the North and in the West. A certain number of nations are experimenting with some equally novel forms of government, which are being grouped under the concept of fundamentalism. I would be tempted to say, as a preface to this discussion, that what characterizes our political epoch is the demarcation between, on the one hand, the regimes that offer a determined resistance to the globalization of the Western model of democracy, by setting forth a different model of popular mobilization in the construction of the nation, and on the other hand, the regimes that either are forced to conform to the democratic model or that spontaneously seek in democracy a means of participating in the globalization of capital and of information.
This is also, in my opinion, the crux of postcolonialism today. I would express it as a particular antinomy resulting from the conflictual, or even contradictory, relations between two modern imperatives: the need for popular mobilization in the economic development of a democratic system, and the imperative for the globalization of the liberal economy, which is the paradigmatic model of the democracy in question. The question that is prohibited within this problematic, and repressed from official discourses, is that of the principal actor—or, if you prefer, of the subject of history.
The angle from which I approach these questions is informed, first and foremost, by my experience as a clinician and theoretician preoccupied with the epistemological presuppositions of a psychoanalytic practice attempting to free itself from the ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism that today dominate the theory and the practice of psychoanalysis. Second, the concrete experience of my personal