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
paradox
“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”
Andreas Fischer-Lescano
limits
“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”
Gisela Febel
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
ideal of a contradiction-free world
“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”
Michi Knecht
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