History today still designates only the set of conditions, however recent they may be, from which one turns away in order to become. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 96)

What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday? (Foucault 1984a: 34)

A particular understanding of historical process as ‘actualisation’ arises from Deleuzian ontology. Actualisation contrasts with the dominant view of history as a dialectical process of progressive harmonisation caused by the generative negativity of desire/lack conceived in relation to a transcendent state of ideal perfection. While similarly driven by causal desire, actualisation is motivated by the immanent positive force of desiring-production, which involves bodies in an open-ended process of becoming. The purpose of the present chapter is now to ask: in the absence of a projected final harmony, what might be understood by the notion of ‘the postcolonial’ in history? In 1784, Immanuel Kant asked a similar question of Aufklärung (Enlightenment), and his response later assisted Michel Foucault in his attempts to conceptualise history as a process marked by rupture and discontinuity (1984a, 1986a). The first part of this chapter will consider Foucault's discussions of Kant on Enlightenment in some detail, in order to define ‘the postcolonial’ as a difference introduced to the process of history with the occurrence of events such as ‘reconciliation’. I will propose that reconciliation does not cause this postcolonial difference, but is, among other events, an effect of a causal disposition towards forms of society that respect the principles of self-determination and peaceful co-existence, and that this causal disposition is a permanent virtuality, immanent to the historical process.