Contradiction Studies

Das Nicht(s)-Wollen wollen: Mittelalterliche Perspektiven auf ein volitionales Paradoxon

Prof. Christian Schneider (U Osnabrück)

06/13/2024 4:15 pm –5:45 pm

U Bremen GRA 2 0030 & online

Medieval debates about the human will take place against the backdrop of a particular tension: that between a person’s own will, usually considered free, and the will of an “other,” especially the will of God. In the Christian tradition, this tension is succinctly expressed in the prayer petition “Fiat voluntas tua,” “Thy (not my!) will be done.” It was perhaps most radically developed in medieval mysticism. The mystics also found a solution to it that seems to amount to a paradox: to will nothing. But the tension between wanting and not wanting also plays an important role outside of theology and mysticism. The lecture will outline different perspectives of medieval (and early modern) texts on the volitional paradox of “wanting not to want.” It will also attempt to build a bridge to relevant contemporary discourses, such as the concept of “un/controllability” (“Un-/Verfügbarkeit”) in sociological resonance theory.

The talk will be held in German.

Back to overview
relational

“At first I thought contradiction was always a relational thing; but the more I ponder it, the more I think contradiction creates relation.”

Ingo H. Warnke
driver

“Contradictions are an important driver of scientific practice and knowledge.”

Norman Sieroka
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
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