In the article ‘Contradiction, intervention and the low carbon transition’, which appears in issue 3 of the 2015 volume of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space and is currently free to access, Vanesa Castán Broto follows Kojève’s reading of contradiction in Hegel’s oeuvre to present an analysis of contradictions in urban low carbon transitions as engines of change. The text below is offered by the author as a supplement to the piece.
Introduction
I fell in love with the idea of contradiction when I stumbled upon Alexandre Kojéve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel at the University College London Library on a cold autumn afternoon. The material sensations of holding the book have preserved this moment in my memory: the lovingly-made hard cover with its fabric coming out; the dusty smell that starts with the passing of the page and settles down slowly until you pass it again; the remnants of the many hands that have gone through these pages, underlining some passages without giving any thought to what future readers will think of it. I can feel the contents of the book grabbing me from the inside, moving me towards a debate around the notion of contradiction and the possibility of change.
Embracing contradiction may be the only avenue for progressive climate change action. This is the central argument that I present in the paper ‘Contradiction, intervention and the low carbon transition’, recently published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. The ideas in this paper emerged from a sense of frustration with current debates about the governance of climate change. I had long observed that ‘contradiction’ was frequently invoked in discussions of climate change governance, but rarely defined. I was sitting at a meeting discussing urban sustainability transitions, when a colleague referred to ‘contradiction’ to explain away the paradoxical nature of climate change governance in certain exemplary European city. This upset me. Like in other occasions, invoking contradiction was a means to end the discussion, rather than to open it up. Reviewing the literature on climate change governance, I struggled to find a coherent means to make sense of what contradictions were and why they mattered.
Until I found, pretty much by chance, Kojéve’s book on Hegel. I read it first out of a sense of curiosity, mostly because there is a part of me which yearns to open dusty covers of books. However, once I read this book, I found myself drawn into its ideas in a manner that I never felt before, not even reading Hegel’s own Phenomenology of the Spirit. Kojéve established a bridge between Hegel’s and my own thinking, and in doing so, it revolutionized everything I ever held sacred about contradictions and the possibility of progressive action in the context of global environmental governance.
Continue reading here.
