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

Back to overview
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
space

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

Julia Lossau
power and resistance

“Michel Foucault says: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and […] this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (History of Sexuality I, The Will to Knowledge, 1976, p. 95)”

Gisela Febel
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
coherence in thought

“The imperative of non-contradiction generally produces a coherence in thought that is often at odds with social complexities.”

Yan Suarsana