Decoloniality and Hegel: Dialectics of Pluriversality

The article investigates the decolonial concept of pluriversality in confrontation with Hegel’s philosophy. Pluriversality is a universal project of decolonization of knowledge stemming from criticism of Eurocentric universalism often epitomized by Hegel’s philosophy. In place of Western abstract universality, decolonial theorists offer a multitude of the particulars. However, their engagement in the relation between universality and particularity exhibits, despite declarations, a fundamental dualism related to “geospatialization” of colonial West and decolonial rest, the Global South. I argue that pluriversality represents a false concrete universality, and that resorting to dialectical understanding of autonomy and freedom brought by Hegel offers a way out of the forfeiture of the emancipatory vocation of decolonial theory. Such engagement in Hegel’s philosophy implies a rethinking of Hegel’s most, in this context, criticized philosophy of history and a revision of the view on Hegel’s coloniality.