Coverbild Exploring the Field

Contradiction Studies – Exploring the Field. An Introduction

Contribution

Gisela Febel, Kerstin Knopf & Martin Nonhoff

2023

Since antiquity in Greece, the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) is considered to be the foundation of all philosophy. As Aristotle maintains in Metaphysics, “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same thing and in the same respect” (1005b, 19–23).

In Febel, Gisela, Kerstin Knopf & Martin Nonhoff (eds.) Contradiction Studies. Exploring the Field. Volume 5 in the Series Contradiction Studies, 1-75. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.

print
ISBN: 978-3-658-37783-0

ebook
ISBN: 978-3-658-37784-7

Back to overview
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
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
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
sustained engagement

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

Norman Sieroka
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