Philosophy in a World of Multi-Crisis: Deborah Nyangulu in Conversation with Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Between May and July 2024, Prof. Dr. Souleymane Bachir Diagne from Columbia University was a U Bremen WOC International Guest Professor at the Collaborative Research Platform Worlds of Contradiction (WOC) at the University of Bremen. During his stay, RTG Contradiction Studies Postdoctoral Researcher, Dr. Deborah Nyangulu sat down with Diagne in a video interview. Filmed at the Übersee-Museum in Bremen, the interview covers a range of topical issues from  the importance of philosophers/academis to speak out against injustices, decolonizing museums, to strengthening African institutions.

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name contradiction

“Contradiction becomes real where someone names contradiction.”

Ingo H. Warnke
space

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

Julia Lossau
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
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