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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sustained engagement

“The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a sustained engagement with contradiction.”

Norman Sieroka
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
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
Is contradiction eurocentric?

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

Kerstin Knopf
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