This Part II of Decolonial Shocking Surprises turn out to be rather long. The reasons are two folds: one is the addition of a comment that appeared in FB and it was related to the issues I discussed in the previous newsletter. The second is that I take this opportunity to re-state what I said that was somehow distorted in the version provided by my critics. I repeat, I am responsible for what I say not for what my critics say that I say. I received the message below from an old friend in South Africa. The message appeared in FB on May 30,2026. Here is the paragraph by Sindre Bangstad:

“One of many paradoxes thrown up by the decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo's full embrace of Russian imperialism in Ukraine since 2022 is that Mignolo was in a previous incarnation perfectly willing to acknowledge the reality of Russian and Soviet imperialism (though it was in his terms a «second class empire»), their parallels with Spanish and British imperialism, and to regard Ukraine as a colonial state in the Russian empire. Granted, there is the same ranting against «the myth of scientific knowledge», the problematic claim that «Putin had to enforce the state» (against Western neoliberalism), and the argument that that one must «reinscribe principles of knowledge and understanding that have been eliminated as irrational by the defenders of modernity» (up and rise, all ye conspiracy theorists left and right). But even so, as Mignolo's erstwhile co-author Madina Tlostanova, who appears to have broken with Mignolo over his support of Putin's war on Ukraine (see her poignant essay in The Thinker, 2025), reminds us, there was in 2006 a double critique in Mignolo's work which has by now completely disappeared.”

One point should become clearer as the argument unfolds: what is at stake here is not a personal disagreement or a mere clash of opinions. It concerns, on the one hand, not simply what is said (the enunciated), but the grounding from which it is said (the enunciation). On the other hand, the matter is not personal but systemic. The locus of enunciation we construct in the act of enunciating—narrating, arguing, describing, accusing, and so forth—is bound to our embodied geopolitical and historical locations, and to what, from those locations, comes to appear as real, natural, or self-evident. Paradoxes are perceived when what is said becomes detached from what is assumed to be objective, real, or natural. I will return to this below as I continue to lay out the conceptual framework of my argument: relational reasoning and the decolonial option.

 When I read the paragraph, I was not familiar with the name posting it. I am not on any of those platforms—Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or X—so I searched for the name in Google that Sindre Bangstad is a Norwegian anthropologist. What first caught my attention was his Norwegian citizens and anthropologist. In my previous “Decolonial Shocking Surprises,” the main figure was Harald Kümmerle, a German national affiliated to the German Institute for Japanese Studies, in Tokyo. Hence, my critics were embodied in European northern history and standard/modern disciplinary formations.

In the paragraph I quoted, Bangstad points towards what he takes to be one of the many paradoxes in my work. Here, the paradox he identifies is my refusal to condemn the Russian special operation in Ukraine. As it is known, since February 2022, much of the European Union—its states, officials, and populations—has entered an increasingly visible Russophobia. I do not remember anything similar in Europe before this, but I do remember the continuing Russophobia in the United States, first in its effort to dismantle the Soviet Union, which it did. One might also recall President Barack Obama’s disappointment at failing to bring Vladimir Putin into full alignment with the discipline of the G8, until the events of 2014 in Ukraine gave the G8 the occasion to become the G7 once again.

For the West—the United States, NATO, and the European Union—2014 was the moment when what had been half-visible became undeniable. What may well have begun as the honest motivation of many Ukrainians to remove Viktor Yanukovych, it was soon interfered and redirected towards the neoliberal designs to dismantle the Russian Federation. The strategy is familiar enough. It consists in taking over popular protests and mass mobilization when the government in question is not aligned with U.S. interests. 

 But where is the paradox? The point is worth pausing on the very word paradox. It comes from the Greek roots’ para, meaning beyond or contrary to, and doxa, from dokein, meaning thought, seeming, or opinion. At its heart, paradoxesmeans contrary to expectation or belief—an idea that runs against common sense or received wisdom, appears contradictory at first glance, yet may reveal a deeper logic when examined more carefully.

 So, in that sense, if paradoxes run against common sense or received wisdom, I must admit that Bangstad is right. In general, my work does run contrary to expectation and belief. However, I am more interested in the second part of the meaning of paradox: what appears as contradictory at first glance, may reveal a deeper logic when examined carully. In this sense, Bangstad missed the point.

 What would be interesting to know is why Bangstad, as well as Kümmerle, regard my refusal to condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine as self-evidently wrong, as though the majority view in Europe and the position of EU leaders ought to be accepted internationally. Europe is no longer what Hegel imagined it to be: the present of time and the center of space. In that sense, Hegelian thought was unmistakably Eurocentric, and Bangstad and Kümmerle seem, at least here, to remain loyal to that tradition.

II

I do not expect a Facebook note to provide bibliographic references. With that caveat in mind, let us look more closely at this statement:

“Granted, there is the same ranting against «the myth of scientific knowledge», the problematic claim that «Putin had to enforce the state» (against Western neoliberalism), and the argument that that one must «reinscribe principles of knowledge and understanding that have been eliminated as irrational by the defenders of modernity» (up and rise, all ye conspiracy theorists left and right).”

 After brushing aside my critique of the “myth of scientific knowledge” as mere ranting (to which I return below commenting on Chilean neurophysiologist Humberto Maturana), Bangstad moves on to two larger claims. The tone is telling. It reads like a defense of the scientific authority of Western ontological reasoning (about what there is) Instead, decolonial relational reasoning (about what believe there is)  asks different questions: what is being disqualified in the very processes of ontological reasonings by means of which reality and objectivity are constituted and naturalized by actors, institutions and languages that control de narrative.

 This is where scientist Humberto Maturana becomes especially useful to me. What I value in his work, among other insights, is the reminder that reasoning does not begin in some abstract realm, as if the mind were floating above life. It begins in living itself: in perception, in relation, in conversation, and in the sensorium through which we move through the world. What we call reason is never detached from that embodied ground. From the very beginning, it is shaped by what we can sense, by the histories we inherit, and by the forms of life within which we learn to see, judge, and make sense of things. Maturana argued, very persuasively, that reality, objectivity (the sacred principle of Western’s science) are argument to convince. That is, rhetorical. He was, through and through, a paradoxical scientist and thinker. His ideas went against expectation and received belief, and that is one reason I have long seen him as a model of rigorous scientific thought. This is the kind of science that I support. I am not against western science but against its epistemic imperial aberrations.

 That we do not see what there is, but we see what we see, is the deeper point I want to underscore: our sensorium guide’s reason. We do not first arrive at a pure, universal logic and only later apply it to the world. We reason from within a historically formed mode of sensing, relating, and inhabiting reality. This is precisely why arguments that run contrary to expectation or belief can appear scandalous at first: they do not merely challenge conclusions; they disturb the sensory and epistemic habits through which conclusions become believable in the first place. Maturana matters to me for exactly that reason. He shows how thought can remain rigorous while still acknowledging that knowing is always sensorial, situated, and relational. That is what I mean by relational reasoning.

III

With these caveats in mind, let us turn to Bangstad’s first claim: that I have argued Putin “had to enforce the state.” That may not be my exact phrasing, but it does broadly reflect a position I have taken—not only with respect to Russia, but also in relation to China, India, Iran, and Turkey. The larger point is simple: if one does not accept Western neoliberal global designs and the supposed inevitability of a universal history culminating in the present unipolar world, then some form of state consolidation becomes necessary for societies that do not wish to be absorbed or overrun by those designs.

 That has been my argument since 2000 and 2011. . What once appeared as Cold War polarization has given way to a broader struggle over dewesternization, carried forward in different ways by China, Russia, and Iran, with BRICS+ as one of its emerging vehicles. The conflict is no longer between two Western ideologies—liberal capitalism and state communism—but between the continued dominance of the West and projects aimed at loosening that dominance. Kishore Mahbubani once described dewesternization as “the return of history.” I suspect this is precisely the terrain to which Bangstad is reacting. Losing privileges is never comfortable.

 It is in this context that strengthening the state is not an end in itself; it is a way of confronting subordination to the United States, the European Union, and NATO. Decolonial relational reasoning trumps Euro centered ontological reasoning. Dewesternization, in turn, provoked its own response: re-westernization. That dynamic became especially visible during the Obama years and the much-discussed “pivot to the Pacific.” The reason was obvious enough: China was no longer at the margins, but fully at the center of the global picture.

 The second claim has a distinctly liberal—or perhaps neoliberal—tone. Bangstad writes that I argue that one must“reinscribe principles of knowledge and understanding that have been eliminated as irrational by the defenders of modernity” But the imperative “must” is his, not mine. I would never frame the decolonial in those terms, which is precisely why I introduced the idea of the decolonial option. The decolonial is an option, not a mission. Bangstad, by contrast, seems to write to advance a mission: to defend values of Western civilization as if it were the universal one instead of, after all, being one civilization among many (bold letters mine). Accusations become handy when you run out of argument or simply you do not have one.

IV

Let’s turn now to Harald Kümmerle’s “Carl Schmitt’ after life,” that I addressed in the previous letter. When he informed his students discussing some of my work that I was supporting (his word, not mine) Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, students were surprised, if not shocked. For many liberal thinkers, especially in the social sciences and the humanities (especially in Europe), names like Carl Schmitt and Vladimir Putin immediately trigger anxiety. What seems to unsettle both Kümmerle and Bangstad is not simply the names themselves, but the possibility of forms of thought that disobey liberal assumptions and run against deeply held beliefs. Hence, the paradoxes!!

 My reading of Schmitt and Putin is different and not marked by anxiety. I am neither European, nor is my intellectual formation anchored in Norway or Germany. It begins in Argentina and in the South America of the 1940s and 1950s, before I ever entered the disciplinary sphere. From that geopolitical location, I approach Schmitt and Putin through a different set of lenses: dependency theory, liberation theology, philosophy of liberation, and, above all, the coloniality of power. One might add a fifth horizon as well: the Caribbean New World Group, which explored dependency through the plantation economy and the racial foundations of slavery. Once that grounding is ignored, and Norway or Germany is treated as the natural point of reference, conversation quickly gives way to misunderstanding, and accusation appears as a form of self-defense.

 Time to invite Aníbal Quijano’s coloniality of power into the conversation, for it helps explain why Carl Schmitt’s reflections on the nomos of the earth became useful to me in thinking about Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. The point is not to adopt Schmitt wholesale, but to grasp the spatial logic of world order that his language brings into view. Schmitt’s narrative turns on two major articulations. The first nomos, according to Schmitt, belongs to the world before 1500, before Europe’s global expansion reorganized the planet by making itself both the center of space and the present of a singular universal historical time. The second begins with that expansion and with the emergence of a Eurocentric international order structured through conquest, partition, and imperial control. Quijano would say that the consolidation of the colonial will to power—embodied in actors, modern imperial European vernacular languages, and institutions—required an instrument: the colonial matrix of power. Its function was to secure the promises of a global order initially grounded in conversion to Christianity, a logic that was later modulated and secularized, so that conversion came to signify progress, civilization, modernization, development, and market democracy.

 In Schmitt’s account, that order began to unravel with the First World War and entered a deeper crisis across the twentieth century. Looking ahead, he envisioned several possible futures: one in which a single power would dominate the globe; another in which older and newer Western empires would manage the transition among themselves; and a third, more relevant here, in which the world would be reorganized into Grossraum—large regional spaces or zones of power, each shaped by its own political center and relatively protected from outside interference.

 Whether one agrees with Schmitt or not, his language remains useful for thinking through a world no longer organized around a single unquestioned center. In my terms, the first two scenarios point toward re-westernization—the effort to preserve a unipolar order under Western direction. The third points toward what is now more commonly called multipolarity: a world of competing regional formations rather than a single universal center.

 I no longer remember whether dewesternization entered my argument because I had already read Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth, or whether Schmitt became meaningful to me because I was already tracing the emergence of dewesternization. In any case, the two lines of reflection converged. My understanding of Russia’s operation in Ukraine took shape within a broader meditation on the history, transformation and current dispute for the management of the colonial matrix of power. Ukraine is at the heart of that dispute. One may choose to support one contender or the other; that is not my concern. My aim is to understand the power differential that led the West—the United States, NATO, and the European Union—to advance its neoliberal global designs, and what led Russia to move to halt those homogenizing designs.

V

What Quijano called the colonial matrix of power is neither a single institution nor a passing historical episode. It is a durable structure of domination that organized the modern world and continues to shape it. Its force lies in the articulation of several domains: control over the economy, over authority, over gender and sexuality, and over knowledge and subjectivity. Colonialism did not merely exploit labor and land. It also ranked peoples, regulated bodies, disciplined institutions, and determined which ways of knowing would count as rational, objective, and universal. That is why the matrix is both structural and relational: it organizes power materially and, at the same time, shapes how reality itself is perceived and named.

 Historically, the matrix took shape with the European conquest of the Americas and the global expansion that followed. From the sixteenth century onward, Europe did not simply add new territories to an existing world; it reorganized the world through conquest, extraction, racial classification, and imperial rule. Modernity and coloniality were born together. What appeared in Europe as progress, rationality, and civilization was inseparable elsewhere from expropriation, enslavement, dispossession, and the production of global hierarchies. For that reason, the colonial matrix of power is not a residue of the past. It is the historical architecture that made the modern world possible, and its afterlives remain very much with us.

 This is where my own work, following Quijano, places special emphasis on knowledge. Control over knowledge is never only about ideas; it is also about the management of subjectivity and intersubjective relations.  It decides who is authorized to describe the world, whose categories become common sense, and which forms of life are dismissed as backward, irrational, or irrelevant. That is why decoloniality cannot be reduced to political protest alone. It also requires delinking from the epistemic habits that made the colonial matrix appear natural in the first place, and reopening the space for other histories, other sensoria, and other ways of reasoning.

 All of this brings about the tricky issue of the digital revolution and AI control of knowledge and mechanization of understanding.

Traditionally, knowledge has referred to the accumulation of facts and skills, while understanding has meant the capacity to grasp meaning, relation, and context. The digital revolution has made information widely accessible and, in doing so, has allowed knowledge to be increasingly processed by digital systems. AI now simulates certain aspects of human understanding by identifying patterns in data and generating inferences. Yet an important divergence remains in the way knowledge and understanding are approached. AI can process, retrieve, and recombine information with extraordinary speed, but it’s “understanding” largely remains at the level of pattern recognition and statistical correlation, without the nuanced, contextual, and interpretive depth that characterizes human comprehension.

Technical control of AI names the capacity to guide and govern these systems so that their operations remain accountable to human purposes, values, and judgments. That question becomes more urgent as AI expands its reach, for it exposes ever more clearly the gap between machine-driven knowledge processing and genuinely human understanding. It also raises broader questions about how such systems are to be woven into decision-making, cultural life, and the organization of knowledge itself. Although this is a topic for another newsletter, it must be kept in view if we are to understand the new complexities assumed by imperial difference in the confrontation between the movement of dewesternization toward multipolarity and the re-westernization’s counterreformation seeking to preserve the privileges of unipolarity.

 To see why this matters now, one must also bring in the imperial difference: the distinction between empires that set the rules of the game and empires that rise within a world already structured by those rules. In my vocabulary, Spain and Britain belonged to the first moment of the colonial matrix, while Russia occupied a more ambivalent position as an imperial formation that was never simply external to Europe, yet never fully identical with its dominant Atlantic powers. That distinction matters because the current dispute between dewesternization and re-westernization is not unfolding on an empty stage. It is taking place within the long afterlife of the colonial matrix of power, where older imperial centers seek to preserve global authority while other state projects try to loosen Western control without necessarily escaping imperial logics altogether.

 The imperial difference helps us see why these struggles cannot be reduced to a simple opposition between empire and anti-empire. They are conflicts within an already colonial world order over who gets to command it, reshape it, or delink from it. From that perspective, Ukraine appears not only as a nation under devastating military assault, but also as the ground on which a larger imperial struggle is being fought. It is one of the places where re-westernization and dewesternizationmeet with exceptional force.

 For the United States, NATO, and the European Union, the war is bound up with preserving the political and security architecture through which Western authority has extended itself since the end of the Cold War. For Russia, whatever judgment one makes of its actions, the conflict has been cast as part of a wider push against that architecture and against the continued expansion of a Western order that presents itself as universal. In that sense, Ukraine is not only the site of a war between states. It is also one of the clearest theaters in which the crisis of the current world order is being played out.

 Saying this does not erase Ukraine’s own agency, nor does it reduce the complexity of its history to someone else’s geopolitical script. It means, rather, that Ukraine has been drawn into a struggle whose stakes exceed its borders. That is the tragedy: a country with its own fractures, aspirations, and historical memories has become the site where competing imperial projects test their strength and legitimacy. Yet the Ukrainian government should not be regarded simply as a victim, as the population often is, but as an active actor that has taken a position within this imperial confrontation. This is why I read the war not only through the language of sovereignty or national self-determination, necessary as those terms remain, but also through the dispute for the control over the colonial matrix of power. The question is not only who invades whom, but what larger configuration of global power makes this battlefield possible, and why so much of the world sees in Ukraine a decisive episode in the conflict between an order struggling to preserve its centrality and forces seeking to displace it.

 This is also where Schmitt’s language of Grossraum becomes newly legible. If the world is moving away from a single unquestioned center and toward a conflict among large regional power-spaces, then Ukraine marks one of the fault lines of that transition. And if one reads that transition through the imperial difference, the picture becomes sharper still: what is at stake is not simply a clash between empires in the abstract, but a struggle between older Atlantic powers seeking to preserve the rules of the existing order and rival powers trying to renegotiate or escape them. Ukraine, in that sense, is not only a battlefield. It is a revealing site where the fractures of the colonial matrix of power become historically visible.

 VI.

Let me now return to Bangstad’s remarks about what he sees as my paradoxical claims on Vladimir Putin. To do so, I want to bring in a prominent American thinker whose arguments are paradoxical because it also runs against common belief: John Mearsheimer, distinguished professor at the University of Chicago. Three aspects of his position matter here: how he explains the root causes of Russia’s special military operation, how he understands the rationality behind the invasion, and how he reads the current state of the war and its possible outcomes. What interests me, above all, is that his analysis is paradoxical in the precise sense I have been emphasizing: it contradicts dominant expectations, unsettles moral comfort, and forces a different view of geopolitical reason.

 Mearsheimer’s central claim is as stark as it is unfashionable: the war in Ukraine should not be read primarily as an irrational outburst or as a simple project of imperial nostalgia, but as the outcome of Western policy itself—above all, the long campaign by the United States and its allies to draw Ukraine into NATO and the European Union. From his realist perspective, Moscow interpreted that trajectory as an existential threat. For that reason, he reads Russia’s actions as strategic and defensive from within its own security logic, not as proof of some uncontrollable desire to resurrect the Soviet empire. This is precisely why his position appears scandalous to many readers: it asks them to suspend moral reflex long enough to confront the geopolitical structure of the conflict.

 At the center of his argument is the insistence that NATO enlargement crossed a line Russia had been signaling for years, especially after the 2008 Bucharest Summit. In this reading, the events of 2014 only hardened that perception. Crimea, and later the 2022 invasion, were cast in Moscow not as random acts of expansion but as preventive moves to block Ukraine’s transformation into a Western military outpost on Russia’s border.

 One does not have to endorse that reasoning to understand the point: great powers act according to strategic calculation, and Russia believed it had been pushed into a situation in which Ukrainian neutrality was no longer being seriously protected.He carries that argument into the present by portraying the war as one of attrition, in which Russia, in his judgment, now holds the advantage in manpower, artillery, and strategic depth. He also contends that Western policy has failed on its own terms: sanctions did not break the Russian economy, military aid did not produce a decisive reversal, and the diplomatic distance between Moscow and Kyiv remains too great for a stable settlement soon. The most plausible outcome, in his view, is not a clean peace, but a long, bitter, and possibly frozen conflict.

 A final element of Mearsheimer’s argument concerns escalation. He repeatedly warns that continued Western involvement—especially if it permits strikes deeper into Russian territory or further blurs the boundary between support and direct confrontation—could widen the war into something far more dangerous. Whether one agrees with him or not, that is the force of his intervention. It runs against the dominant moral consensus and compels readers to face a geopolitical logic that liberal narratives often prefer not to see. In that sense, his argument is paradoxical in the strongest sense of the word: it cuts against expectation and belief, not to provoke for its own sake, but to expose the structure of reason hidden beneath accepted opinion.

VII

A brief note on gossip. Bangstad writes: “But even so, as Mignolo’s erstwhile co-author Madina Tlostanova, who appears to have broken with Mignolo over his support of Putin’s war on Ukraine (see her poignant essay in The Thinker, 2025), reminds us, there was in 2006 a double critique in Mignolo’s work which has by now completely disappeared.”

 I do not know that “broken” is the right word. Since February 2022, Madina and I have had countless conversations over Zoom, and although our perspectives on Ukraine have clearly differed, disagreement does not necessarily amount to rupture.

The “w” questions are of the essence: who says what, where, when, why, with what purpose? The reason for our different takes on Ukraine lies largely in those distinct groundings. Madina writes from a formation shaped by Russian and Swedish citizenship, by Circassian ancestry, and by a Muslim family background. I write from another location altogether: as an Argentine and U.S. citizen, of Italian descent, formed within a Catholic family and a South American horizon of thought. These differences do not explain everything, but they do matter. They shape what each of us sees—we do not simply see what is there; we see what we are able to see—what each of us emphasizes, and how each of us enters the question of Ukraine. That is why, when I served as co-editor of The Thinker in 2025, I was fully aware of her position on the Russian invasion—or, if one prefers, the special military operation. Whatever starting point one chooses for the argument, our divergence was never hidden.

 But rather than turning this into a personal issue, as I have already said, I am interested in clarifying why Bangstad sees paradoxes where I see coherence in the unfolding of the decolonial conceptual framework. My understanding of double critique is not necessarily his. I repeat I am responsible for what I say, not for what my critics say I say. Two points will suffice. When President George W. Bush declared on television, in relation to the invasion of Iraq, “you are either with me, or with my enemy,” several of us working from a decolonial perspective responded: “Neither with you nor with your enemy, George. Better to ask why Saddam Hussein is your enemy, or how you turned him into one.” The roots of such enmity are not personal, as though they could be resolved through psychoanalysis. They are systemic: domination generates conflict, though responses to that conflict vary. One need only think of the joint effort by Israel and the United States to contain, if not eliminate, Iran, because the Iranian government does not accept the dominant demands imposed by that axis.

 Double critique is not limited to our gaze at what is said, the enunciated. To focus only on the enunciated and ignore the saying, the level of enunciation, is to misread the problem from the start. When I endorsed Abdelkebir Khatibi’s idea of double critique—his critique of both Muslim fundamentalism and Western fundamentalism—I did not overlook the differential in power. Western fundamentalism has occupied the driving seat, for historical reasons, in ways Muslim fundamentalism has not. Otherwise, we would not be witnessing Israel’s genocide and the war declared by the U.S.–Israel axis, or perhaps Israel–U.S., against Iran.

 Seen from that angle, I suspect Bangstad expects double critique to operate as an even-handed denunciation of two imperialisms at once, disregarding the imperial differential:  on the one hand, what I would describe as the disguised aggression of the West—above all the United States, the European Union, and NATO—and, on the other, Russia’s open military response to that longer geopolitical pressure after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But that is not quite how I understand double critique in this case. For me, the issue lies less at the level of what is said that at the level of enunciation: the critique of Western narratives of liberation, democracy, and freedom when those narratives conceal the coloniality of a larger project aimed at containing, weakening, or dismantling the Russian Federation. From the perspective of the colonial matrix of power, domination cannot remain peaceful.

 On the contrary, it generates conflict precisely when its colonial will to power is no longer accepted as natural. That is one of the liberal and neoliberal political paradoxes reproduced in Western scholarship. In that sense, double critique returns like a boomerang. It sends the question back to Western narratives that present themselves as emancipatory while obscuring their own imperial designs and accusing Russia of seeking imperial restoration. I am not persuaded that the latter is the best way to understand Russia under Putin, though that discussion would take us too far afield here.

But even if one were to accept, for the sake of argument, that Russia is animated by imperial ambition, a prior question would remain: why is such ambition treated as uniquely intolerable when Western efforts to contain Russia and China, and to maintain the privileges of 500 years of Westernization, are so often presented as natural, necessary, or even virtuous? That asymmetry, it seems to me, is itself part of the problem that double critique is meant to expose. It is one expression of the power differential inscribed in imperial difference.

 VIII

This (long) newsletter has revolved around two intertwined questions: first, the relation between the decolonial and Carl Schmitt; and second, the relation between the decolonial and Russia’s so-called special military operation, or invasion, in Ukraine. What binds these questions together is not a taste for provocation, but a concern with how geopolitical reality is read, from where it is read, and under what historical assumptions it becomes intelligible.

 This continuation of Decolonial Shocking Surprises returns, more explicitly, to the tension named in the title: between Western modernity’s ontological reasoning and the decolonial option’s relational reasoning. Through Schmitt, the colonial matrix of power, imperial difference, Ukraine, and the body politics of knowing and understanding, I have tried to show that the divergences at stake here are neither personal nor accidental. They point, rather, to a wider systemic conflict over who gets to name the world, whose categories come to appear universal, and why what registers as paradox in one locus of enunciation appears as coherence in another.

In that precise sense, the issue has never been personal. It is systemically geopolitical and body-political: a question of who speaks, from where, and from within which history certain truths acquire the authority of common sense, while other ways of seeing are disqualified as paradoxical.