»Paying attention to contradictions ›allows an argument to take off in one direction by rendering another (direction of argument) also present‹« (Marilyn Strathern)

,

Michi Knecht (RTG Contradiction Studies)

07/07/2022 5:45 pm –7:00 pm

U Bremen GRA 2 0030

Readings

Bartole, Tomi. 2020. The Ontological Antinomy. Food, Surfaces, and Transcendence in the Village of Awim, Papua New Guinea. In HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10(3), 874–889. https://doi.org/10.1086/711879 (17.05.2022).

Mol, Annemarie. 2002. TheBodyMultiple: Ontology inMedicalPractice. Durham: Duke University Press,Chap. 4:›Distribution‹, 87–118.

Back to overview
Is contradiction eurocentric?

“Is contradiction a eurocentric concept, operational phenomenon, and instrument of power?”

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
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
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
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