Organiser: Matthias Kaufmann, Fazil Moradi, Richard Rottenburg
Venue: University of Halle
What does it mean to speak of, resist or appeal to a new beginning in the name of decolonization? What positionality and form of knowledge does the speaking of decolonization involve that allows distinguishing and moving between a colonized past and a decolonized future to come? How does this form of knowledge facilitate the necessary cognitive operations of commensuration, calculation of equivalence, and valuation? What is the ontological status of the tertium comparationis for these operations to work? Does the unavoidably implicit valuation mean a call for justice and accountability to the law that invokes a common humanity? In what sense can and for what reasons should this refer to a horizon of planetary hospitality?
Speaking of the planetary instead of the global redirects attention to a contemporary shift from a humanity struggling to control its environment to a humanity struggling to understand its entanglements with other-than-human beings and to lean into them. Speaking of hospitality here employs the sense given to this term by Emmanuel Levinas, Jacque Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Michael Jackson and others in this genealogy: one’s own humanity can only be learned from the Other, by hosting the Other in a horizon of unconditional hospitality. These are questions that we wish to address in this workshop.
