MODERNITY'S EDGES 35 attraction of the project is that it leads to a distinctive vision of political criticism's demands. Foundationalism, of whatever kind, is untenable: "It makes that which is emergent in history or encoded in culture an immutable first principle" (ILM, 215). And yet, this rejection of foundationalism does not imply that nothing can or need be grounded or theoretically justified: "(t)he effort here will be to see if these (the emergent in history or the encoded in culture) can be theoretically grounded in the process of becoming"(ILM, 216). Javeed uses the dialectical stance - "that which is immanent in history cannot be foundational because it cannot be outside the process of unfolding or becoming"(ibid.) - to generate, not just a distinctive method of political criticism, but an account of the very subject matter of political criticism itself. ILM is not a very long book, but its architectonic seems pretty fraught and categorical. It might be useful to distil its main elements into a manageable set of propositions. I distinguish ten theses that are at the core of Javeed's project, though they by no means exhaust the details of what he has to say. I will formulate them in a way that makes for ready intelligibility, while not always departing from the letter of his writing. (i) 'Modernity' is the primary moral predicate, not nationhood and/or nationalism; nationhood is defined simply as a constituting positivity. That there are streams of nationalism within this positivity - as also the fact that the shape and process of national consolidation in the colonized world entail occupying the same demarcated spaces as carved out by colonialism - will mean that they are contextually determined, not mandatory, although, of course, they can (and have been) mandatory in determining a whole course of politics in twentieth century India. (ii) There is a central sense of modernity that derives from what is an 'unembodied surplus' in the philosophical thought of the modern. It needs to be distinguished from the dominant form of modernity that became historically embodied - 'entrenched modernity' - in conjunction largely with capitalism. While the latter needs to be rejected - being of necessity exclusionary and homogenizing - the possibility of separating necessary from historical relations must entail that what became entrenched with modernity is a matter of historical contingency and that there is no logical relation between the exclusionary features of modernity and modernity per se. Modernity is thus more than what is encapsulated in its entrenched form. Central to this bifurcation is the belief, issuing off a putatively Hegelian coordinate that there is no going back in history: indeed, that modernity is not only desirable but also irreversible.