Toolbox – Contradiction Studies #10 in the winter term 2025/26
l’illusion d’une unité
“Foucault speaks of contradiction as l’illusion d’une unité.”
Ingo H. Warnke
decolonial scholarship
“Creating decentralizing and decolonizing scholarship on contradiction, contradictory phenomena, and contradicting processes is a challenging task.”
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
ideal of a contradiction-free world
“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”
Michi Knecht
problem to be solved
“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”
Martin Nonhoff