Against Pluriversality: Epistemology, Ideology, and the Disavowal of Capitalist Antagonism

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a dramatic surge of interest in decolonial pluriversality across critical geography, political ecology, and development studies. Advanced most prominently by scholars, such as Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, pluriversality promises a world in which multiple ontologies, epistemologies, and lifeways coexist without subordination to Western modernity. Although this project has contributed important critiques of Eurocentrism and epistemic violence, the present article offers an immanent critique of pluriversality as a contemporary political ontology. I argue that, in privileging epistemological difference and cultural authenticity, dominant strands of pluriversal thought systematically displace questions of political economy, class antagonism, and state power. Existing critiques have identified this displacement, yet they often treat it as a theoretical oversight rather than as an ideological formation. Drawing on Marxist political economy and Lacanian psychoanalysis—particularly the recent reworking of disavowal by Alenka Zupančič and current research on psychoanalytic geography—the article advances a different claim: Pluriversality operates through a fetishistic disavowal of capitalism, offering a libidinally satisfying fantasy of non-antagonistic plurality that leaves the structures of accumulation, exploitation, and domination intact. Against this epistemological politics of difference, I argue for an antagonistic conception of universality grounded not in shared identity or culture, but in common exposure to capitalist dispossession and socio-ecological crisis.