Contradicting Contradiction. Knowledge Production and the Pluriversal Turn

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Dr. Deborah Nyangulu (RTG Contradiction Studies)

01/23/2024 2:30 pm –4:00 pm

U Bremen GRA 2 0030 & online

In my presentation I will draw on different examples to show how contradiction is a plural noun and a polysemous word. I will argue that rejecting the pluralism of contradiction functions (i) as a strategy gatekeep knowledge and (ii) as a means by those who desire dominance to enforce conformity. I will conclude by showing the implications of my argument on knowledge production at a time when decolonial thininkers, notably from the Latin American school of thought, are using the concept of the pluriverse to explore the co-existence of multiple worlds and realities.

Back to overview
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
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
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
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
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