Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy has been systematically excluded from the canon of radical political thought, dismissed as quietist resignation incompatible with emancipatory projects. This article challenges that exclusion by developing the concept of the pluriversal subject, a political subjectivity derived from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will, ethics of compassion (Mitleid), and aesthetic cognition. Where Laclau’s empty signifier demands that particular claims be made equivalent—sacrificing irreducible difference at the moment of articulation—and Žižek’s neo-Hegelian framework reinstates a privileged subject-position grounded in class antagonism, the pluriversal subject achieves solidarity through compassionate recognition of shared suffering without homogenizing the plurality of political claims. Drawing on Schopenhauer’s epistemological break from the Kantian-Hegelian tradition, his engagement with non-Western philosophical traditions, the activation of his ideas through the Nietzschean-Deleuzian lineage and Latin American decolonial thought (Mignolo, Quijano), the article demonstrates that his metaphysics furnishes a non-rationalist, non-identitarian ground for radical democratic politics under conditions of pluriversality.

This study examines the experiences of non‑Western European (NWE) students, from post‑socialist countries, enrolled in the International Studies in Education Programme (ISEP) at the University of Iceland. Drawing on critical internationalisation studies and postcolonial theory, it analyses how global white supremacy, racial triangulation, and neoliberal precarity shape these students’ identities and senses of belonging within an ostensibly egalitarian academic setting. Informed by Edward Said’s Orientalism, Johann Herder’s romantic nationalism, and the notion of Euro‑Orientalism, the
study conceptualises NWE students as ‘exotic insiders’, who must negotiate symbolic whiteness and conditional inclusion. The methodology combines 5.5 hours of semi‑structured interviews (126 transcript pages) with the author’s reflexive narrative. The findings expose a dissonance between Icelandic ideals of multiculturalism and students’ lived realities, revealing the limitations of incremental reform and the need for transformative, decolonial interventions. In doing so, the study advances
critical debates on pedagogy, coloniality, and systemic inequities in Nordic higher education.