Toolbox – Contradiction Studies #14 in the winter term 2025/26
space
“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.
Julia Lossau
paradox
“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”
Andreas Fischer-Lescano
l’illusion d’une unité
“Foucault speaks of contradiction as l’illusion d’une unité.”
Ingo H. Warnke
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
hierarchy of norms
“If social contradictions are reflected in law, law cannot form a hierarchy of norms free of contradictions.”
Andreas Fischer-Lescano