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Exploring Contradictions beyond Contradiction

1st International Conference on Contradiction Studies

RTG Contradiction Studies

02/11/2025 –02/14/2025

U Bremen

Contradictions are omnipresent and the identification of contradictions is usually accompanied by the imperative to resolve them. Contradictions can be ascribed to individual actions as well as to social formations. They extend to all areas of life: political orders, academic settings, religious practices and many more fields that are permeated by them. Without contradictions, there are no pluralities and no truths. Nevertheless, there is a long and powerful (especially European) tradition of problematizing and resolving contradictions and reducing them to logical incompatibility. This tradition of avoiding contradiction is countered by alternative concepts of thinking contradiction, above all in dialectics or paraconsistent logic (Priest/Tanaka [1996]2022). Contradiction Studies take up this reflection and move away from the widespread negative assessment of contradiction (cp. Febel/Knopf/Nonhoff 2023; Lienert 2019; Lossau/Schmidt-Brücken/Warnke 2019; Nintemann/Stroh 2022; Warnke/Hornidge/Schattenberg 2021). In this sense, our conference aims to explore contradictions beyond contradiction.

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Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
every day

“Living in contradictions is what we experience every day. Why do we know so little about it?”

Gisela Febel
articulate

“Contradictions need to be articulated in order to exist.”

Martin Nonhoff
decolonial scholarship

“Creating decentralizing and decolonizing scholarship on contradiction, contradictory phenomena, and contradicting processes is a challenging task.”

Kerstin Knopf
idea of democratic critique

“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”

Martin Nonhoff