Contradiction Studies

In the psychology of music and basic auditory research, there is talk of “paradoxes of hearing” or “musical paradoxies” (Deutsch 1986, 275-280; Utz 2015, 22-52; Deutsch 1995). But can auditory impressions really be paradoxical? What exactly should it mean what exactly should it mean to “hear paradoxes” or even to “hear paradoxically”? We will pursue this question in the following and in doing so, we will first define the concept of paradoxia for the present context – namely in the sense of ambiguity and discrepancy ambiguity and a discrepancy. We will then develop a typology, which at the same time shows the fundamental significance that ambiguities have for music – or more precisely: for the enduring appeal of pieces of music.


Paradoxien des Auditiven? Ambiguitäten und Diskrepanzen beim Hören und in der Musik. In Catherine Herbin (ed.), Paradoxien: Grenzdenken und Denkgrenzen von A(llwissen) bis Z(eit), 177–201. Paderborn: Brill mentis.

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sustained engagement

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

Norman Sieroka
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
problem to be solved

“Contradiction is not primarily a problem to be solved but a motor we cannot do without.”

Martin Nonhoff
space

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

Julia Lossau
power and resistance

“Michel Foucault says: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and […] this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (History of Sexuality I, The Will to Knowledge, 1976, p. 95)”

Gisela Febel