After Europe, Before the World

What interests me most in Yuk Hui’s Post-Europe is not simply his critique of Europe, but the difficulty of escaping Europe even when one declares the need to think after it. Hui’s book is important because it refuses two easy positions: the defence of Europe as the privileged bearer of universal civilisation, and the anti-European return to cultural essence or tradition. His central claim is that thinking today must begin from Heimatlosigkeit, or homelessness, rather than from the nostalgic desire to recover Heimat. I find this argument powerful because it speaks directly to our present condition: we can no longer return home, yet we also cannot live without some sense of locality, orientation, and belonging.

Hui defines the task as one of “post-European thinking,” neither through the neutralisation of differences nor through a return to tradition, but through an “individuation of thinking between East and West.” I am sympathetic to this ambition. At the same time, I think the book’s strength also reveals its limits. The question for me is whether Hui’s attempt to move beyond Europe remains caught within the conceptual structures it seeks to overcome.

My first hesitation concerns Hui’s reliance on Heidegger. Hui draws on Heidegger’s diagnosis of modernity, technology, and uprootedness to develop the concept of Heimatlosigkeit. His originality lies in transforming this concept. Instead of following Heidegger’s desire for a return to Heimat, Hui asks us to think from homelessness itself. This is an important displacement. Yet I still wonder whether genuinely post-European thinking can begin so decisively from Heidegger.

Heidegger is not merely one European thinker among others. He provides much of the vocabulary of home, destiny, rootedness, world-historical decline, and technological danger that Hui wants to rethink. Even when Hui reverses Heidegger’s nostalgia, he still accepts Heidegger’s framing of modernity as a crisis of homelessness. In this sense, Post-Europe may not fully escape Europe. It may repeat Europe at the level of the question itself. Europe remains the wound, the point of departure, and the philosophical horizon from which the problem is posed.

For me, Hui’s most provocative move is to turn homelessness into a standpoint. Rather than treating Heimatlosigkeit only as loss, he presents it as an opening: a way to rethink locality, world history, and planetarity without returning to nationalism or cultural purity. I find this persuasive, but also politically ambiguous. Homelessness is not experienced equally. The homelessness of the refugee, the migrant worker, the colonised subject, the academic intellectual, the digital nomad, and the cosmopolitan philosopher are not the same.

This is where I think Hui’s argument risks becoming too elegant. Heimatlosigkeit can become a philosophical metaphor before it becomes a material condition. In the contemporary world, homelessness is produced by border regimes, war, housing speculation, debt, ecological destruction, racial capitalism, and state violence. Hui does mention the housing crisis, war, technological acceleration, AI, and ecological-economic catastrophe. But I would like to see a stronger account of the specific structures of power that cause people to become homeless. The political question should be: who is made homeless, by whom, and through what institutions?

This question becomes sharper when we compare Hui’s project with the Japanese wartime discourse of “overcoming modernity.” That debate also criticised Western modernity, rationalism, liberalism, capitalism, individualism, and cultural fragmentation. Yet, as the history of the Kyoto School and the 1942 symposium shows, the critique of Western modernity became entangled with Japanese nationalism and imperial ideology (Calichman, pp. vii–xvi, 1–40; Stevens, pp. 229–30). The desire to overcome Europe could become the justification for a new imperial mission (Stevens, pp. 229–35).

Hui is clearly aware of this danger. He does not propose Asia as Europe’s successor, nor does he replace European universalism with an East Asian counter-universalism. This is one of Post-Europe’s strengths. Still, once one begins to speak of Europe, Asia, East, West, tradition, and locality, one is already moving within a field of civilisational categories. Hui wants to pluralise these categories through individuation, but he does not always show how such individuation avoids being reabsorbed into cultural essentialism.

This does not mean that Hui repeats the Kyoto School’s politics. But the historical lesson is severe: a critique of European modernity is never politically innocent. It can open a path toward pluralisation, but it can also become the language of reaction, civilisational resentment, or authoritarian cultural politics.

This is why I remain uneasy about the East-West frame. Hui does not want a universal philosophy that subsumes all traditions into a single European model. Nor does he want a simple return to tradition. Yet his formulation still depends on the East-West binary. Even when Hui complicates the binary, it remains the main stage on which the drama of post-European thinking unfolds. Europe is provincialised, but Asia is still summoned as Europe’s privileged interlocutor.

For me, the problem is that neither Europe nor Asia exists as a stable civilisational substance. Europe is not simply the origin of reason, universality, or technology. Asia is not simply the bearer of relationality, spirituality, locality, or alternative cosmotechnics. Both Europe and Asia are modern historical constructions, produced through colonialism, capitalism, translation, war, nationalism, migration, and global comparison. Hui himself cites Françoise Dastur’s warning that discourses on Europe are ideological constructs bound to colonial conceptions of the world. But this insight must also be applied to Asia.

For this reason, the modern Asian discourse of “the people” is crucial. I want to treat both “Asia” and “the people” as political inventions rather than natural realities. Liang Qichao’s “new citizen,” Okakura Kakuzō’s “Asia is one,” Tagore’s ethical universalism, and Takeuchi Yoshimi’s “Asia as Method” all show that Asia was not simply discovered. It had to be imagined, narrated, and politically fabricated. The old civilisational order is replaced by a global map of nation-states, forcing China to imagine itself as a nation among nations and to refashion its population into a modern citizenry (Tang, pp. 9, 23). Liang’s “new citizenry” required a new collective consciousness and a rhetoric of national crisis through which the people could become the foundation of a modern state (Tang, p. 194).

In this sense, Asia is a strategic abstraction. It gathers immense differences, such as languages, religions, classes, regions, histories, and political struggles, into a single image. This image can be emancipatory when it resists Western imperial domination, but it can also become dangerous. Okakura’s claim that “Asia is one” turns Asia into a spiritual and aesthetic unity, a “united living organism” and “Great Mother” bearing a civilisational destiny (Okakura, The Ideals of the East, p. 9). His Book of Tea even identifies Teaism with the “true spirit of Eastern democracy,” displacing democracy from institutional politics to taste, sensibility, and everyday cultivation (Okakura, The Book of Tea, p. 4). This produces an Asia that appears morally and aesthetically unified, but it also risks erasing internal divisions of class, caste, gender, empire, and nation.

The history of Pan-Asianism clearly shows this ambiguity. What begins as anti-imperial solidarity can become civilisational nationalism; what begins as a critique of Western domination can become a justification for Japanese imperial expansion. The debate on “overcoming modernity” demonstrates precisely this danger. Bernard Stevens describes the 1942 symposium as a project that aimed to surmount modern Western civilisation, but one whose ideological consequences were disastrous in the context of the Japanese imperial regime during the Fifteen Year War (Stevens, pp. 229–30). His crucial point is that the Kyoto School’s philosophical and humanistic message must be separated from its political misadventures, especially because the critique of modernity could be redirected toward neo-fascist or ultranationalist ends (Stevens, pp. 229–35).

The Kyoto School is important here because it offers both a resource and a warning. Its thinkers did not merely import Western philosophy. They transformed it through Buddhist and Japanese concepts such as nothingness, emptiness, place, self, world, and historical existence. The Kyoto School was constituted by a rigorous commitment to East-West dialogue rather than by a dogmatic creed (Davis, Schroeder, and Wirth, pp. 1–2). They also stress that its thought is inherently dialogical, moving between Eastern and Western philosophical and religious traditions (Davis, Schroeder, and Wirth, pp. 2–4).

But this political ambiguity also shows that philosophical dialogue between East and West can be absorbed into nationalist or statist projects. Hui is aware of this danger. In his discussion of Nishitani, he shows how the experience of Heimat, even something as bodily and intimate as the taste of Japanese rice, can mediate the relation between body, land, and homeland. Yet this experience also leads toward the problematic history of “overcoming modernity,” in which European modernity is seen as a fragmenting force and East Asian thought appears as a possible alternative to European decadence.

This is where I would push Hui’s argument further. The task is not simply to think “post-Europe.” Nor is it enough to individuate thought between East and West. We must also ask how the very opposition between Europe and Asia was produced, and how it continues to shape our imagination. Asia is not outside Europe. It is one of the effects of European planetarisation, but also one of the sites where that planetarisation is resisted and transformed. Europe and Asia are not two separate worlds that later encounter one another. They are co-constituted within planetary modernity.

For this reason, the subject of post-European thinking cannot simply be “Asia.” Nor can it be “Europe after Europe.” What is needed is the invention of a new people. These people would not be defined by ethnicity, nation, civilisation, or homeland. It would be a political collectivity formed through shared struggles over technology, ecology, migration, labour, memory, and planetary inequality.

Here, Étienne Balibar’s concept of fictive ethnicity becomes useful. The people are never given; they are fabricated through narratives of origin, continuity, and belonging. In Balibar’s terms, populations are retrospectively represented as if they possessed a common origin, culture, and destiny that transcends their actual divisions (Balibar and Wallerstein, pp. 102–3). My point is that “the people of Asia” should be understood in this way too. They are not discovered in history. They are called into being as the possible subject of a world still to be made.

This is why I find Takeuchi Yoshimi’s “Asia as Method” more useful than a simple opposition between Europe and Asia. Takeuchi does not treat Asia as a fixed identity. Asia is a method, a critical standpoint from which Europe’s incomplete universalism can be transformed. He argues that European equality was never universal, since Europe’s history of colonial exploitation in Asia and Africa shows that its own values remained restricted and incomplete. The task of Asia, then, is not to imitate the West, but to “re-embrace” and transform it so that its universal values may be realised on a greater scale (Takeuchi, p. 165).

But I would also push Takeuchi further: if Asia is a method, then it must also be a method for overcoming “Asia” itself. Asia should not become the final name of the new subject. It should function as a transitional and critical device, a means of forcing universality beyond Europe without reducing Asia to a new essence. Hui’s Post-Europe opens the question of thinking beyond European universality, but it does not fully dismantle the Europe-Asia frame within which the question is still posed.

A genuinely planetary philosophy cannot remain confined to an East-West dialogue. It must also think with Africa, Latin America, the Pacific, Indigenous worlds, archipelagic worlds, diasporic worlds, and the internal colonies of both Europe and Asia. Otherwise, planetarity risks becoming a conversation between Europe and East Asia rather than a real transformation of the philosophical map.

One of Hui’s strongest insights is that technology is not culturally neutral. Technologies carry forms of world-making, models of individuation, modes of production, and assumptions about human beings, nature, and social order. I agree with this. But I also think his critique of technological universalism remains underdeveloped at the institutional and practical levels. What would it mean to organise AI, logistics, agriculture, urban planning, or digital infrastructure according to the principle of post-European individuation? What legal, economic, ecological, and pedagogical forms would make technodiversity possible?

Without such mediation, technodiversity risks remaining a philosophical ideal rather than becoming a political-economic project. Technology today is not simply an abstract planetary force. It is owned, financed, patented, militarised, standardised, platformised, and governed. A critique of technological planetarisation must therefore also be a critique of corporations, states, infrastructures, standards, supply chains, and military systems.

This points to another concern. Hui sometimes gives philosophy a privileged role in responding to planetarisation. The task is presented as a reorientation of thinking, a transformation of standpoint, an individuation of thought. I value this, but I also think it may overestimate philosophy’s autonomy. The history of “overcoming modernity” shows that philosophy does not stand outside political forces. Philosophical concepts can be appropriated by the state, empire, nationalism, cultural institutions, and technological power.

For this reason, post-European philosophy must ask not only, “How should we think?” but also, “What protects thinking from becoming ideology?” Hui criticises the “state thinker,” but I think the book could go further in explaining how thought can remain politically effective without becoming attached to state power, civilisational mission, or cultural identity.

The unresolved question, for me, is universality. Hui rejects European universalism, but he also rejects simple relativism. His answer is individuation: different traditions must develop their own modes of thought in relation to one another. This is promising, but from a Simondonian perspective, it also raises a problem. Individuation, for Simondon, does not begin from already constituted individuals, cultures, or traditions. It begins from a preindividual field of tensions, potentials, and unresolved problems. An individual is not a fixed unit that later enters into relation; it is the temporary result of a process of becoming. Relation is not secondary to identity. The relation is constitutive of individuation itself.

This creates a difficulty for Hui’s formulation. If “Europe” and “Asia” are treated as already individuated traditions that must then enter into dialogue, the concept of individuation risks being culturalised. It becomes a way of pluralising civilisational identities rather than transforming the field from which such identities emerge. A Simondonian critique would therefore ask whether Hui’s “individuation of thinking between East and West” still presupposes East and West as relatively stable poles. If so, individuation is being used to mediate between inherited categories rather than to undo their very conditions of formation.

This also changes the question of universality. Planetary problems such as climate change, AI governance, war, migration, and ecological collapse cannot be solved by locality alone. But the answer is not simply to restore universality at a higher level, even in a non-imperial form. From Simondon’s perspective, universality should not be understood as a norm imposed from above, nor as a consensus among pre-existing traditions. It should be understood as a transindividual process: a collective individuation that emerges through shared problems, technical mediations, and common transformations.

In this sense, the planetary is not a universal framework into which localities must be inserted. It is a metastable field in which localities, technologies, institutions, bodies, and environments are co-individuated. Climate change, for example, is not merely a global problem requiring universal norms; it is a problematic field that forces new forms of collective and technical individuation. The same is true of AI, migration, and ecological collapse. These problems do not simply demand agreement between local traditions. They require the invention of new transindividual forms of life.

This is where Hui’s appeal to locality and technodiversity remains underdeveloped. If technologies are embedded in cosmological and cultural worlds, as Hui argues, then the task is not only to defend different technological traditions against Western technological universalism. The deeper task is to ask how new associated milieus can be formed: how technical systems, social institutions, ecological conditions, and collective subjects can be reorganised together. Simondon’s concept of the associated milieu is useful here because it shows that technology is never merely an instrument of a culture. A technical object individuates together with its milieu. It transforms the conditions in which it operates, just as it depends on those conditions for its functioning.

A Simondonian critique would therefore say that Hui’s post-European thinking still risks remaining too cultural-philosophical. It speaks of traditions, localities, and cosmotechnics, but it does not fully explain how new transindividual collectivities and associated milieus are produced. The problem of universality after Europe cannot be solved by multiplying local cosmotechnics alone. It requires an account of how shared planetary problems generate new processes of collective individuation.

The challenge, then, is not to choose between European universalism and plural localities. Nor is it enough to call for an individuation of thought between East and West. The more radical Simondonian question is: what new transindividual subject can emerge from the metastable tensions of the planetary condition? Universality would then no longer mean the expansion of one civilisation’s values, nor the abstract agreement of many cultures. It would name the open-ended process through which new people, new technical milieus, and new forms of collective life are individuated in response to planetary problems. The challenge, then, is to think a non-imperial universality: a universality that does not erase difference, but also does not abandon the possibility of common struggle. Hui gestures toward this, but I do not think the concept is fully developed.

For these reasons, I read Post-Europe as an important beginning rather than a final answer. Its strength is that it opens the question of thinking after Europe. Its limitation is that it does not fully ask how “Asia” itself must also be overcome as Europe’s mirror image. A truly post-European thinking must also become post-Asian in this specific sense: not by abandoning Asia, but by refusing to let Asia remain trapped as Europe’s other.

To sum up, Yuk Hui’s Post-Europe offers a powerful critique of European universalism and the reactionary desire to return home. But the project remains partly bound to the civilisational opposition between Europe and Asia. Since both Europe and Asia are historical constructions produced within planetary modernity, Asia cannot simply serve as the alternative to Europe. The task is not to replace Europe with Asia, nor even to pluralise Europe through Asia, but to dismantle the Europe-Asia dichotomy itself. What must be invented is a new people capable of carrying a non-imperial universality beyond both European universalism and Asian essentialism.

References

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Calichman, Richard F., ed. Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Davis, Bret W., Brian Schroeder, and Jason M. Wirth, eds. Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

Hui, Yuk. Post-Europe. Falmouth: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2024.

Liang, Qichao. Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio: Essays on China and the World. Translated by Peter Zarrow. London: Penguin, 2024.

Okakura, Kakuzō. The Book of Tea. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 1956.

Okakura, Kakuzō. The Ideals of the East: With Special Reference to the Art of Japan. New York: Stone Bridge Press, 2007.

Saaler, Sven, and Christopher W. A. Szpilman, eds. Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Volume 1: 1850–1920. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011.

Stevens, Bernard. “Overcoming Modernity: A Critical Response to the Kyoto School.” In Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School, edited by Bret W. Davis, Brian Schroeder, and Jason M. Wirth, 229–246. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

Takeuchi, Yoshimi. What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi. Translated and edited by Richard F. Calichman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Tang, Xiaobing. Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.