This Expert Talk is part of the lecture series “Bremer Denkanstöße” by the Institut für postkoloniale und transkulturelle Studien (INPUTS), U Bremen.
sustained engagement
“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”
Norman Sieroka
earthing
“Geography as a discipline stands for a certain worlding, if not earthing, of contradiction, in both theoretical and pracitcal respect.”
Julia Lossau
problem to be solved
“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”
Martin Nonhoff
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
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