Contradiction Studies

Natalja Gorbanewskaja. Graphic Novel

Article / Paper

Susanne Schattenberg & Anna Che

2022

“She was a poet as great as Joseph Brodsky and a human rights activist as fearless as Andrei Sakharov. Unlike Brodsky, however, she did not receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and unlike Sakharov, she did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize. However, her name is associated with a unique event in the Soviet Union: On August 25, 1968, she and seven other young people came to Red Square to demonstrate openly against the regime – and against the suppression of the Prague Spring by tanks from the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries.”

https://dissident.dekoder.org/natalja-gorbanewskaja/

Projekt von dekoder-lab

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every day

“Living in contradictions is what we experience every day. Why do we know so little about it?”

Gisela Febel
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
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
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
coherence in thought

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

Yan Suarsana