The postcolonial thinkers discussed so far have all articulated a clear set of political goals and have tended to tie their writing to some form of direct political activism. Fanon and Gandhi were major revolutionary figures, Sartre and Said both combined academic work with political journalism, and Foucault and the Subaltern Studies Collective gave historiography a militant political agenda. Yet within the series of thinkers outlined so far it is nevertheless possible to discern an increasing interest in culture, language and the “politics” of representation, and it is to this more “textualist” postcolonialism that this chapter will turn via an exploration of Jacques Derrida and Homi Bhabha. These latter philosophers do not overlook the political, although the controversy surrounding their degree of political efficacy will be examined later, but it is nonetheless indisputable that their postcolonial critique is directed not so much against individual regimes as against the ethnocentrism of Western metaphysics. Derrida and Bhabha target not the mechanics of colonial exploitation in Algeria or India but the structure of the Western epistēmē, which positions the European subject at the centre and subordinates other cultures. This analysis of the Western philosophical tradition and its configuration of self and other may have a political dimension but, unlike the work of militants such as Fanon and Sartre, the objective is not political liberation (Derrida and Bhabha in any case write after the decolonization of many overseas territories in the 1950s and 1960s), but the creation of a postcolonial ethics.