Cover of "Gott, ein Gefüge" by Yan Suarsana. It shows a white marble statue of crucified Jesus in front of an old tree.

This book extends the contemporary debate on the global concept of religion, conducted in the context of religious studies, to the field of the theology of religions. In applying poststructuralist and postcolonial perspectives, it seeks to deconstruct central categories such as truth, universality, or religion, in order to contextualize them by making transparent their historical genealogy and entanglement with political, social, and scientific discourses. Further, it aims to outline new areas of thinking, which can serve as the experimental basis of an alternative, non-essentialist form of theology (of religions).


ISBN: 978-3-8471-1335-5

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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
city

“The city is a laboratory not only of modernity, but also of contradiction.”

Julia Lossau
hierarchy of norms

“If social contradictions are reflected in law, law cannot form a hierarchy of norms free of contradictions.”

Andreas Fischer-Lescano
ideal of a contradiction-free world

“Science has long been animated by the ideal of a contradiction-free world in which logical orders could merge with society, politics, culture and language. In the GRC Contradiction Studies we are working on ways of describing the multiplicity and complexity, the danger and beauty of our worlds that clearly go beyond concepts of freedom from contradiction.”

Michi Knecht
decolonial scholarship

“Creating decentralizing and decolonizing scholarship on contradiction, contradictory phenomena, and contradicting processes is a challenging task.”

Kerstin Knopf