Anger, hope, Utopia, and radicalism are the four axes of V. Y. Mudimbe's work in the 1970s. There is in this corpus a marked tendency to exaggerate the West's supposed oneness and to convey the impression that the world, to use an expression first coined by Chinweizu and the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, is made up of the ‘West and the Rest’. This dualistic dimension is all the more surprising given that Mudimbe advocates at the end of both L'Autre Face and L'Odeur an epistemological ‘insurrection’ that would reject the very dualistic basis upon which colonialism and neo-colonialism are predicated. The ‘autre’ and ‘père’ in the titles are signs of Mudimbe's willingness to engage with psychoanalysis (see also CG, 27–28; É, 15–16; CB, 47–50) and to establish an analogy between the construction of subjectivity and decolonisation considered in these essays as a process, which would put an end to individual and collective alienation. By way of the concept of ‘aphanisis’, a term borrowed by Jacques Lacan from Ernest Jones to account for the disappearance or ‘fading’ of the subject in the process of alienation, Mudimbe argues that colonisation and alienation are governed by the same ‘vel’ logic (either/or):