Can the post-Soviet think

Podcast

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Can the Post-Soviet Think?

Central Problem

Can post-Soviet subjects produce original knowledge, or are they trapped in a double bind of epistemic coloniality? Tlostanova investigates why Russian and post-Soviet social sciences remain largely invisible in global academia—not merely due to Western hegemony but also because of chronic intellectual dependency, “secondary Eurocentrism,” and the complex interplay of external imperial difference (Russia’s subaltern position vis-à-vis the West) and internal colonial difference (Russia’s own colonizing relationship with its non-European peripheries). The question “Can the post-Soviet think?” echoes Spivak’s “Can the subaltern speak?” but addresses a distinct configuration: subjects who were once second-world producers of knowledge but have been epistemically erased and struggle to articulate independent critical thought.

Main Thesis

The post-Soviet condition is marked by a unique coloniality of knowledge stemming from external imperial difference—Russia’s position as a “not-quite-Western, not-quite-capitalist” empire that was epistemically colonized by the West while simultaneously colonizing its own peripheries (Caucasus, Central Asia). This generates “secondary Eurocentrism”: Russian scholars mimic Western methodologies while projecting Orientalist attitudes onto their own colonies. The result is epistemic stagnation: Russian social sciences oscillate between derivative Westernization and reactive nationalist fundamentalism, while non-Russian post-Soviet scholars face double colonization (Western and Russian). The way out lies not in recognition claims but in delinking from the catching-up logic, learning to unlearn Western and Soviet epistemic frameworks, and developing original critical knowledge rooted in local histories without provincialism.

Historical Context and Intellectual Background

After 1989, Western sovietology collapsed alongside its object of study. The “end of history” discourse (Fukuyama) rendered the post-Soviet world epistemically invisible—millions of people whose existence became irrelevant to global knowledge production. Cold War social sciences had divided knowledge into:

1. Imperial social sciences: Theory-producing, conducted by/about the West
2. Colonial area studies: Descriptive, applied to non-Western regions
3. Sovietology: A hybrid area study that collapsed with its object

Post-Soviet scholars faced impossible choices: (a) adopt Western methods wholesale (secondary Eurocentrism), (b) retreat into insular nationalist “indigenous science,” or (c) attempt critical delinking—the rarest option. Meanwhile, Western posthumanism (Braidotti) and transdisciplinary projects, while promising, remain blind to persistent power asymmetries in global knowledge production.

Key intellectual contexts include:

• Decolonial thought (Mignolo, Quijano, Dussel): Critique of modernity/coloniality
• Lewis Gordon’s “disciplinary decadence”: Disciplines lose contact with reality
• Spivak’s “sanctioned ignorance”: Western erasure of non-Western knowledge
• Castro-Gómez’s “zero point epistemology”: The hubris of claiming a view from nowhere

Philosophical Lineage

flowchart TD
    Quijano --> |Coloniality of power| Mignolo
    Mignolo --> |Geopolitics of knowledge| Tlostanova
    Spivak --> |Sanctioned ignorance| Tlostanova
    Castro-Gómez --> |Zero point epistemology| Tlostanova
    Gordon --> |Disciplinary decadence| Tlostanova
    Sartre --> |Mauvaise foi| Gordon
    Dussel --> |Transmodernity| Mignolo
    Tlostanova --> |Post-Soviet critique| DecolonialOption[Decolonial Option]

    class Quijano,Mignolo,Tlostanova,Spivak,Castro-Gómez,Gordon,Sartre,Dussel internal-link;

Key Thinkers

Thinker	Dates	Movement	Main Work	Core Concept
Mignolo	1941-	Decolonial Theory	The Darker Side of Modernity	Geopolitics of knowledge, colonial difference
Spivak	1942-	Postcolonial Theory	A Critique of Postcolonial Reason	Sanctioned ignorance, subaltern
Gordon	1962-	Africana Philosophy	Disciplinary Decadence	Bad faith in disciplines, teleological suspension
Castro-Gómez	1958-	Decolonial Theory	La hybris del punto cero	Zero point epistemology
Braidotti	1954-	Posthumanism	The Posthuman	Post-anthropocentrism, zoe

Key Concepts

Concept	Definition	Related to
Geopolitics of knowledge	Knowledge is always produced from a specific spatial-temporal location; this locality is erased by universalist claims	Mignolo, Decolonial Theory
Body-politics of knowledge	Knowledge rooted in individual/collective biographical trajectories marked by race, gender, religion	Mignolo, Tlostanova
Zero point epistemology	The Western illusion of speaking from nowhere, from a neutral universal position	Castro-Gómez, Descartes
Imperial difference	The gap between first-class Western empires and subalternized “not-quite-Western” empires (Russia, Ottoman)	Tlostanova, Mignolo
Colonial difference	The gap between Western empires and their colonized others	Quijano, Mignolo
Secondary Eurocentrism	Non-Western empires mimicking Western colonialism in their own peripheries	Tlostanova
Disciplinary decadence	Disciplines losing contact with reality, defending methods over truth	Gordon
Sanctioned ignorance	Systematic Western ignorance of non-Western knowledge	Spivak

Authors Comparison

Theme	Tlostanova	Mignolo	Spivak
Focus region	Post-Soviet space, Russia	Latin America, Global South	South Asia, Global South
Key problematic	Can post-Soviets produce knowledge?	Decolonial option	Can subaltern speak?
Colonial configuration	External imperial + internal colonial difference	Colonial difference	Epistemic violence
Solution	Delink, learn to unlearn, create local theory	Border thinking, pluriversality	Strategic essentialism
On Western theory	Secondary Eurocentrism as trap	Appropriation for decolonial ends	Critique from within

Influences & Connections

Predecessors

• Quijano: Coloniality of power as matrix of modernity
• Dussel: Transmodernity, critique of Eurocentrism
• Fanon: Colonial psychology, decolonization of mind

Contemporaries

• Mignolo: Collaborator; geopolitics/body-politics of knowledge framework
• Gordon: Disciplinary decadence, Africana philosophy
• Braidotti: Posthumanism (critiqued for blindness to power asymmetries)

Successors

• Suchland: Post-socialist critique
• Central Asian scholars: Emerging decolonial voices from the region
• Cross-Roads Asia Network: Post-area studies approaches

Summary Formulas

1. The Post-Soviet Paradox: Post-Soviet subjects lost their status as knowledge producers (second world → void) without gaining the voice of postcolonial critique.

2. External Imperial Difference: Russia = subalternized empire, epistemically colonized by West, yet colonizing its own peripheries → “Janus-faced empire” playing both roles.

3. Secondary Eurocentrism: Russian scholars mimic Western methodologies + project Orientalism onto Caucasus/Central Asia = doubly colonized knowledge in the peripheries.

4. Disciplinary Decadence: Methods reject reality; disciplines become self-referential rituals → “bad faith” (Sartrean mauvaise foi) fleeing responsibility through false objectivity.

5. The Way Out: Not recognition claims to the West, but delinking from catching-up logic + learning to unlearn + creating original theory rooted in local histories without provincialism.

Timeline

Year	Event
1989	Fall of Berlin Wall; collapse of sovietology as area studies
1992	Fukuyama publishes The End of History
1998	Castro-Gómez & Mendieta: Teorías sin Disciplina
1999	Spivak publishes A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
2001	David Chioni Moore applies postcolonial theory to post-socialist world
2006	Gordon publishes Disciplinary Decadence
2006	Mignolo & Tlostanova: “Theorizing from the Borders”
2010	Tlostanova publishes Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian Borderlands
2012	Tlostanova & Mignolo: Learning to Unlearn
2013	Braidotti publishes The Posthuman
2015	Tlostanova publishes “Can the Post-Soviet Think?”

Notable Quotes

“I am where I think’ sets the stage for epistemic affirmations that have been disavowed. At the same time, it creates a shift in the geography of reasoning.” — Mignolo

“Disciplinary decadence is when a ‘method facilitates the epistemic rejection of reality’ and scholars concentrate on the problems of frozen and de-ontologized disciplines and not human beings in the real world.” — Gordon

“Freeing oneself from coloniality of knowledge is a long and painful process which requires learning to unlearn in order to relearn but on different grounds and sometimes actually creating and remaking these grounds.” — Tlostanova

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Warning

This annotation was normalised using a large language model and may contain inaccuracies. These texts serve as preliminary study resources rather than exhaustive references.