Poster for the Event "Was ist `Osteurpoa´?

Was ist „Osteuropa“? Geschichte und Gegenwart eines widersprüchlichen Konzepts

Anastasia Tikhomirova (Journalist ZEIT and ZEIT Online), Hans-Christian Petersen (Bundesinstitut für Kultur und Geschichte des östlichen Europa Oldenburg), Artur Weigandt (Author and Journalist), Klaas Anders (RTG Contradiction Studies)

10/29/2024 7:00 pm

Bibliothek der Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst

Since the total invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, the term “Eastern Europe” has been omnipresent – whether in social media posts or feature articles: Everyone is talking about “Eastern Europe”. But what does “Eastern Europe” actually mean? Who belongs to it and who doesn’t? How useful is it to lump Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine into one category? Are there “good” Eastern Europeans who are allowed to be in the EU and NATO, and “bad” ones who (have to) stay out?

We want to discuss these and other questions together with our guests. The focus will be on the contradictions that characterize the concept of “Eastern Europe” – a concept whose meaning is negotiated daily between Western ideas and a multitude of complex identities.

An event by

Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, Worlds of Contradiction, globale° Festival für grenzüberschreitende Literatur, DFG-Graduiertenkolleg “Contradiction studies”, Weserburg Bremen

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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
earthing

“Geography as a discipline stands for a certain worlding, if not earthing, of contradiction, in both theoretical and pracitcal respect.”

Julia Lossau
hierarchy of norms

“If social contradictions are reflected in law, law cannot form a hierarchy of norms free of contradictions.”

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
paradox

“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano