How to Keep Theory Open to Contradiction

Dr. Christian Leonhardt (InIIs), Samia Mohammed & Carolin Zieringer (InIIS & RTG Contradiction Studies)

12/12/2023 2:30 pm 4:00 pm

U Bremen GRA 2 0030 & online

The lecture and discussion will be held in English. Based on Christian’s lecture titled “Poetics of Theory. Contradictory Narrations and Activist Theory Production” we will approach the question of contradiction/contradicting and its (reflexive) relation to the practice of theory.

Dr. Christian Leonhardt | InIIs

Samia Mohammed | InIIS & RTG Contradiction Studies

Carolin Zieringer | InIIS & RTG Contradiction Studies

Back to overview
Afterlife of colonialism

“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

Rozena Maart
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht
space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

Julia Lossau
city

“The city is a laboratory not only of modernity, but also of contradiction.”

Julia Lossau
interstice

“The contradiction of law in Derrida lies in the interstice that separates the impossibility of deconstructing justice from the possibility of deconstructing law.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano