Key to the postcolonial discourse is an interpretation of the relation of identity and difference in which the terms of the relation are construed in a geocultural sense. The West is colonial in the sense that it silences difference in defence of its singular identity and eschatological economy. The postcolonial discourse has an assumption and an aim. It assumes that the modern, Western conception of knowledge is of an instrument for materialising a pre-determined end. Knowledge in Western hands is not descriptive, not a picture of how things are in themselves. It rather is a utilitarian tool with which the West establishes epistemic and ethical hegemony, and appropriates to itself the singular agency of global salvation. The European self is driven by a jealous cogito, one that reiterates its uniqueness and the concomitant dualism of the West and the rest. It is an entity that has ontological autonomy and it constitutes the boundary of thought. The Western singularity is intolerant of difference. It imagines difference in contrast to its identity, denies cognitive and ethical agency to the non-West, and reduces the civilizational other to a knowable object that can then be represented in discourse. Thus, Western colonialism entails dualism of the Orientalist sort. "Orientalism," said Edward Said, "is a style of thought that is based upon ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and the Occident" (Said 1978: 2). West is West, East is East. The latter is an inert object and must be silent, the former is a self-conscious subject and it alone can speak. Either there is the singular agency of the West and a singular, Western discourse on global ethos; or there is no We s t, no unifying categories of thought, and no human world. The sovereignty of either/or logic is total.