Contradiction Studies

Work Meeting with Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Prof. Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia University & WoC guest professor)

05/23/2024 4:15 pm –5:45 pm

U Bremen GRA 2 0030 & online

Prof. Souleymane Bachir Diagne in Discussion with emerging scholars at the Research Training Groups 2686 Contradiction Studies.

Prof. Dr. Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a philosopher in the Department of French at Columbia University in New York. A graduate of the world-renowned École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he studied with Jacques Derrida and Louis Althusser, among others. Diagne was initially Professor of Philosophy at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar (Senegal), 1993-99 personal advisor to the Senegalese President Abdou Diouf for the areas of culture and education, before moving to the USA in 2002, where he has been working at Columbia University in New York since 2008 following a professorship in African philosophy at Northwestern University (Evanston/Chicago).

Prof. Diagne is one of the world’s leading experts in the research fields of African philosophy and literature, the history of philosophy, epistemology and Islamic philosophy. Recently, he has been working on theories of universalism and the question of restitution in colonial contexts. His publications have received numerous awards (including the Edouard Glissant Prize and the Dagnan-Bouveret Prize for Moral and Political Sciences) and are available in French and English. A whole series of interviews translated into German, for example in Merkur, ZEIT Online or on arte, also make his thoughts accessible to the German public. Diagne is a member of the advisory board of several journals such as the renowned “Présence Africaine” and is chairman of the scientific advisory board for the Franco-German Fund for Provenance Research, especially on African artifacts, at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin.

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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
diversity and plurality

“Join us to create more diversity and plurality in knowledge production.”

Gisela Febel
hierarchy of norms

“If social contradictions are reflected in law, law cannot form a hierarchy of norms free of contradictions.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
Is contradiction eurocentric?

“Is contradiction a eurocentric concept, operational phenomenon, and instrument of power?”

Kerstin Knopf
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