Taking its conceptual cue from Fredric Jameson's ""Postmodernism. Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" and Jacques Derrida's essay "Racism's Last Word," this piece tries to think the post- at once in its dependence -- that is, in its relation to something other than itself (postmodernism, postcolonialism/postcolonialism, post-apartheid, post-Communist and so on) -- and as a thing in itself. Therein lies the difficulty, of course, the impossibility of wresting the post- out of its

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... To this end, this essay uses Jameson and Derrida to take up the difficulty of disarticulating the post- from its relation so that concepts such as postmodernism and post-apartheid figure critically but not, it is important to note, in such a fashion as to obscure entirely the "meaning" of the post- in its knotted, entangled singularity.