Susan Buck-Morss - Böcker

Susan Buck-Morss asks: What does revolution look like today? How will the idea of revolution survive the inadequacy of the formula, “progress = modernization through industrialization,” to which it has owed its political life?Socialism plus computer technology, citizen resistance plus a global agenda of concerns, revolutionary commitment to practices that are socially experimental and inclusive of difference—these are new forces being mobilized to make another future possible.Revolution Today celebrates the new political subjects that are organizing thousands of grass roots movements to fight racial and gender violence, state-led terrorism, and capitalist exploitation of people and the planet worldwide. The twenty-first century has already witnessed unprecedented popular mobilizations. Unencumbered by old dogmas, mobilizations of opposition are not only happening, they are gaining support and developing a global consciousness in the process. They are themselves a chain of signifiers, creating solidarity across language, religion, ethnicity, gender, and every other difference.Trans-local solidarities exist. They came first. The right-wing authoritarianism and anti-immigrant upsurge that has followed is a reaction against the amazing visual power of millions of citizens occupying public space in defiance of state power.We cannot know how to act politically without seeing others act. This book provides photographic evidence of that fact, while making us aware of how much of the new revolutionary vernacular we already share.Susan Buck-Morss is distinguished professor of political philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, NYC. Her work crosses disciplines, including art history, architecture, comparative literature, cultural studies, German studies, philosophy, history, and visual culture.

Susan Buck-Morss examines and stresses the significance of Critical Theory for young West Germ intellectuals after World War II.Looking at the differences between German and American situations during this time period, Origin of Negative Dialectics convincingly sketches the learning process that ended in antagonism. “[The Origin of Negative Dialectics] is by far the best introduction for the American reader to the complex, esoteric, and illusive structure of thought of one of the most seminal Marxian thinkers of the twentieth century. It belongs on the same shelf as Martin Jay’s history of the Frankfurt School, The Dialectical Imagination.” – Lewis A. Coser, State University of New York, Stony Brook

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates.Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a \u201cnew humanism,\u201d one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.

Susan Buck-Morss asks: What does revolution look like today? How will the idea of revolution survive the inadequacy of the formula, “progress = modernization through industrialization,” to which it has owed its political life?Socialism plus computer technology, citizen resistance plus a global agenda of concerns, revolutionary commitment to practices that are socially experimental and inclusive of difference—these are new forces being mobilized to make another future possible.Revolution Today celebrates the new political subjects that are organizing thousands of grass roots movements to fight racial and gender violence, state-led terrorism, and capitalist exploitation of people and the planet worldwide. The twenty-first century has already witnessed unprecedented popular mobilizations. Unencumbered by old dogmas, mobilizations of opposition are not only happening, they are gaining support and developing a global consciousness in the process. They are themselves a chain of signifiers, creating solidarity across language, religion, ethnicity, gender, and every other difference.Trans-local solidarities exist. They came first. The right-wing authoritarianism and anti-immigrant upsurge that has followed is a reaction against the amazing visual power of millions of citizens occupying public space in defiance of state power.We cannot know how to act politically without seeing others act. This book provides photographic evidence of that fact, while making us aware of how much of the new revolutionary vernacular we already share.Susan Buck-Morss is distinguished professor of political philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, NYC. Her work crosses disciplines, including art history, architecture, comparative literature, cultural studies, German studies, philosophy, history, and visual culture.

Renowned critical theorist Susan Buck-Morss argues convincingly that a global public needs to think past the twin insanities of terrorism and counter-terrorism in order to dismantle regressive intellectual barriers. Surveying the widespread literature on the relationship of Islam to modernity, she reveals that there is surprising overlap where scholars commonly and simplistically see antithesis. Thinking Past Terror situates this engagement with the study of Islam among critical contemporary discourses-feminism, post-colonialism and the critique of determinism.In a new preface to this paperback edition, Susan Buck-Morss reflects on the events that have marked the world since the book was first published.

Renowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss collaborates with Boot Boyz Biz's Kevin McCaughey and Inventory Press' Adam Michaels on this experimental image-text update of McLuhan and BenjaminRenowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss collaborates with Kevin McCaughey of Boot Boyz Biz and Adam Michaels of Inventory Press on this experimental image-text renewal of McLuhan, Berger and Benjamin.Seeing <―> Making: Room for Thought both studies and presents the creative process of constructing ideas with images. By activating the techniques of montage and analogy, the book reveals a wide field of view and a space to engage new critical connections between a multiplicity of objects from the past and present. Realized through an intergenerational collaboration of three cultural producers committed to making theory visible, a transformative anthology of critical essays by Susan Buck-Morss anchors this kaleidoscopic project. Images and ideas sync with Buck-Morss’ perceptive texts on visual culture, history, politics and aesthetics, fusing criticism with visual play and linking collective imagination and social action.In both design and content, Seeing <—> Making: Room for Thought builds upon the dynamic sensorium of Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore's book The Medium Is the Massage, Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and John Berger's Ways of Seeing. This innovative volume brings Buck-Morss’ more experimental, visually engaged work to the fore in a way that has not been available in the usual contexts within which her writing has appeared.