Toolbox – Contradiction Studies #14 in the winter term 2025/26: : Informal annual meeting
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
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
coherence in thought
“The imperative of non-contradiction generally produces a coherence in thought that is often at odds with social complexities.”
Yan Suarsana
l’illusion d’une unité
“Foucault speaks of contradiction as l’illusion d’une unité.”
Ingo H. Warnke