Toolbox in the Summer Term 2025
city
“The city is a laboratory not only of modernity, but also of contradiction.”
Julia Lossau
decolonial scholarship
“Creating decentralizing and decolonizing scholarship on contradiction, contradictory phenomena, and contradicting processes is a challenging task.”
Kerstin Knopf
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
sustained engagement
“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”
Norman Sieroka
relational
“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”
Ingo H. Warnke