Workspace/Kolloquium #1 in the winter term 2025/26
driver
“Contradictions are an important driver of scientific practice and knowledge.”
Norman Sieroka
power and resistance
“Michel Foucault says: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and […] this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (History of Sexuality I, The Will to Knowledge, 1976, p. 95)”
Gisela Febel
space
“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.
Julia Lossau
idea of democratic critique
“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”
Martin Nonhoff
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