cover "Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung"

Based on the omnipresence of euphemistic talk about listening, the essay examines the network of relationships between listening and discourse. A widespread myth, in which listening is understood in isolation as a replicative action and the imponderables of listening are systematically covered up, is contrasted with the assumption that listening is language in contradiction and as such constitutive for discourse and vice versa. The question is about the possibilities of a sociolinguistics of listening and in particular about a conceptual classification of listening in the field of tension between the positivity of speech and the intentionality of listening. I speak of discourse phenomenology, without overlooking the fact that this also breaks up a scientific-historical juxtaposition of discourse analysis and phenomenology.


Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung 2. 176 – 182.

DOI: 10.3262/ZFD2202176

Back to overview
prison of difference

“‘Contradiction is the prison of difference‘ writes the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Worlds of Contradiction asks: how can we explain and describe the world without making it more coherent and systematic than it is?”

Michi Knecht
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
decolonial scholarship

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

Kerstin Knopf
coherence in thought

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

Yan Suarsana
Is contradiction eurocentric?

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

Kerstin Knopf