Conversation with Professor Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Our postdoctoral researcher, Deborah Nyangulu,  had a wide ranging interview with Senegalese philosopher, Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia University and 2024 Worlds of Contradiction visiting professor). The interview ranged from discussing Professor Diagne’s work in philosophy, how to read Léopold Sedar Senghor, revisiting the category of the universal to  the place of Africa and pan-africanism in a geopolitical context of a falling imperial order. You can listen to the podcast interview on Spotify, Audible,  or Deezer

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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
paradox

“The basis of law is not an idea as a systematic unified principle but a paradox.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
articulate

“Contradictions need to be articulated in order to exist.”

Martin Nonhoff
space

“According to Niklas Luhmann, space is a ‘special facility to negate contradictions’”.

Julia Lossau
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