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The author doesn't reference Derrida (they rarely do) but the entire paradigm is very recognisable. All the bits in the “depressingly familiar vision” listed above are lifted straight from Derrida or other European poststructuralists – the fixation on categories, the ethics of responsibility, humility, no-outside, “modernity”, “hospitality”, glorification of lack, anti-egoism/attacking egos... it's textbook. So they might not MENTION Derrida (or Lacan or Foucault or their Anglophone crudifiers) but the underlying blueprint is obvious. Kinda like if he was going on about “dictatorship of the proletariat” and “dialectical materialism” you'd say he was a Marxist, even if he never mentioned Marx. I know very well that decolonial, Queer Theory, postcolonial theory etc like to pretend they aren't just applied poststructuralism. It is also a key tenet of Derridean theory that the same statement repeated from a different point of view is actually a different statement, and authorial intent is not relevant to repetitions – which perfectly authorises this kind of dissimulation or false consciousness by crypto-Derrideans. But I find it untenable that people JUST HAPPENED to arrive at THE EXACT SAME CONCLUSIONS that Derrida reached over 50 years ago, independently, from two dozen different non-western or subaltern (e.g. Queer, feminist...) traditions of thought, without basically lifting the whole thing from Derrida. Or that people coming independently from very different histories of oppression in very different reasons, just happen to spontaneously arrive at this foreshadowed set of ideas. Which leads me to the conclusion that they aren't deriving this stuff from non-western traditions at all – they're lifting it from Derrida and then passing it off as non-western, so as to insert themselves (and perhaps some Derrideanised remnants of their non-western traditions) into western academia. Crucial point: this is NOT a distinct indigenous or Southern point of view, it's an application of European theory which dresses itself up as distinct.

Once in academia, they replace readings of the big-name authors with readings of their own set of imitations of the big-name authors, saying very similar things, but from a “non-western” point of view (i.e. their own). They will read a standard subset of Derrida-clones like Spivak, Bhabha, Mignolo, Butler, etc – who in fact devote a great part of their word-count to references to European big-name authors. There is no big trend to study writers outside the European tradition, such as Black Elk or Confucius, Ibn Khaldun or Gandhi or Mao or Sankara, or classical Indian or Islamic writings, which fall outside the Derridean paradigm. There's an outright hostility to ethnography and anarcho-primitivism, and thus to any concrete evidence of non-western forms of thought. They might have students read for example Fanon or Said or Du Bois, but these are carefully contained in such a way that they are (wrongly) understood as Derridean. Anything outside the Derridean paradigm is either stamped-on or accepted on condition it be repackaged as Derridean. Witness the explosion of pieces discussing yoga, Sufism, Andean cosmology etc in Derridean terms, primarily as (internal) transgressions/deferrals of “modern reason” (as if this is why they exist! - itself a terrible Eurocentric reduction). In practice this often entails the Derridean academics – who control entire departments in areas like Education and Cultural Studies – being the ones who teach the students to focus on the big European texts (even if focused on their critique or repetition “from the margins”).

Does it allow people to imagine other worlds? No, because it only permits INTERNAL suspension of dominant norms. Anyone who closely reads Derrida, or any of his hangers-on, knows that he thinks radical change is IMPOSSIBLE. Read Force of Law for example. The utopian possibility of a just world is a kind of ideal horizon which by definition cannot be reached, but can be insinuated into actual systems of unjust power as a kind of internal subversion and endless questioning. There is absolutely no revolutionary possibility in this vision, in fact it denies the possibility of stateless society in advance. It's utterly reformist, in fact worse than reformist, it denies the possibility of both reforms and radical change (which is why I say it's worse than AOC/Sanders-style democratic socialism). Yet Derridean hangers-on repeat the entire paradigm without, apparently, realising this, and posture as the most radical, the most revolutionary. I have also found them super-sectarian down the years – they endlessly find reasons why every emergent alternative, every form of drop-out culture or counterculture, every partial autonomy in a particular field, every insurrection or revolt is “really” just another instance of modernity/white supremacy/patriarchy because it isn't absolutely 100% pure of capitalism and/or isn't 100% in accord with Derridean dogma. I can provide examples if you need them, articles on Bristol social centres and Greek riots and Canadian communes, attacks on Anonymous/Wikileaks, on Indymedia, on the Invisible Committee, on refugee solidarity and so on. Attacks which are absolutely destructive of the forms of desire and commitment which lead to radical action and radical change, and which echo the endless self-flagellation of medieval ascetics. Attacks which are warmly welcomed in academia, and which are creeping into activism via idpol.

Also, people aren't anywhere near as incapable of imagining other worlds to begin with, as the Derrideans pretend (because structuralists are wrong about the deep causality of language... even if people occasionally slip-up as regards unconscious racism or whatever, this does not prove that their ENTIRE STRUCTURE OF DESIRE is a product of modernity/racism). Autonomous social movements of the 60s-90s were quite capable of imagining other worlds; so are science fiction and fantasy writers. Derridean theory rests on a mind-trick of conning people into believing that any possible “outside” they can imagine is actually just a ruse or repetition of western modernity, so that actually they need to accept they can't imagine an outside, and then endlessly work on mastering the Derridean affective/spiritual stance so as to become capable of imagining an outside (without this ever really becoming possible). There is a professional interest in the role of being someone who “shows” how deep the power of modernity goes and “opens the space to imagine alternatives” - a professional interest which requires that the alternatives never be imagined. If it ever became possible or was realised, the Derrideans would be out of a job.

You say decolonisation is impossible, because pre-colonial cultures are already destroyed or hybridised etc... In which case, why go on about decolonisation at all? Why not instead focus on building worlds based on the desires people happen to have in the present – regardless of where they came from?

BTW you're completely wrong about this... not only are there still non-capitalist ways of life around the edges of capitalism which haven't been destroyed yet, but people constantly create new non-capitalist ways of life in social movements and practices of resistance. Capitalism/colonialism has a root in particular material socioeconomic relations of power – centralised state violence, money as universal equivalent, commodification/commodity fetish, atomisation and Spectacle. These forms of top-down power have to be reproduced every day and are vulnerable. They are not effects of the desires of the people on the receiving end; rather, they keep people passive and restrict their desires. Destroy these forms of top-down power (or create more powerful forms of bottom-up or horizontal power) and the whole machine falls apart. People would begin creating “outsides” right away, like they did in the 60s. Give it a few centuries and people would recreate non-capitalist ways of life with all the richness of those before. Whether people have residues or capitalist desire, or even whether some are outright bigots becomes irrelevant. Without centralised power and general equivalents, people can't impose their spooks on others. And all the endless self- and mutual flagellating about not being able to find a perfect non-capitalist desire in advance (because any such desire is predefined as impossible), and thus endlessly “unlearning” and “educating” and self-changing, is a barrier to the necessary work of smashing these systems of control. And if we're dwelling on who's (ontologically) a “settler” and who's not, or whether people are reproducing some marginal type of prejudice in their language or whatever, then we're NOT doing the far more important work of actually building alternatives among the people who are actually here, which lead BEYOND the present system.