Spaces of Dissension

Edited Volume

Julia Lossau, Daniel Schmidt-Brücken & Ingo H. Warnke (eds.)

2019

This volume focusses on contradiction as a key concept in the Humanities and Social Sciences. By bringing together theoretical and empirical contributions from a broad disciplinary spectrum, the volume advances research in contradiction and on contradictory phenomena, laying the foundations for a new interdisciplinary field of research: Contradiction Studies. Dealing with linguistic phenomena, urban geographies, business economy, literary writing practices, theory of the social sciences, and language education, the contributions show that contradiction, rather than being a logical exemption in the Aristotelian sense, provides a valuable approach to many fields of socially, culturally, and historically relevant fields of research.

Volume 2 in the Series Contradiction Studies

print
ISBN: 978-3-658-25989-1

eBook
ISBN: 978-3-658-25990-7

Back to overview
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
l’illusion d’une unité

“Foucault speaks of contradiction as l’illusion d’une unité.”

Ingo H. Warnke
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
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
hierarchy of norms

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

Andreas Fischer-Lescano