The Czechoslovak Exile in Vienna (1968–1989) as a Space of Dissension
At the Panel “Memory, Conflict and Nation-Building” of the World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) 2024
prison of difference
“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”
Michi Knecht
paradox
“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”
Andreas Fischer-Lescano
Is contradiction eurocentric?
“Is contradiction a eurocentric concept, operational phenomenon, and instrument of power?”
Kerstin Knopf
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
sustained engagement
“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”
Norman Sieroka