Susan Buck-Morss

An English reconstruction and analysis of Benjamin's Passagen-Werk.

Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

The Dialectics of Seeing

Adam Michaels

Kevin McCaughey

Renowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss collaborates with conceptual apparel label Boot Boyz Biz's Kevin McCaughey and Inventory Press' Adam Michaels on this experimental image-text update of McLuhan and Benjamin Showing how the montage principle allows thought to occupy the space between two seemingly unrelated things, Seeing Making Room for Thought both studies and embodies how an arrangement of images can be a form of thinking--in other words, images not as illustrations or objects of analysis but as a montage. In a close collaboration with designers Kevin McCaughey (founder of the popular conceptual clothing line Boot Boys Biz) and Adam Michaels of Inventory Press, renowned philosopher Susan Buck-Morss expands on her unique conception of montage, combining images and text--also integrating excerpts from Buck-Morss' previous work--in an innovative way that provides insight into images and how they work together. In both design and content, Seeing Making Room for Thought is directly in conversation with Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore's The Medium Is the Massage, as well as the works of Walter Benjamin. 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. Susan Buck-Morss is the author of The Origin of Negative Dialectics (1977), The Dialectics of Seeing (1989), Dreamworld and Catastrophe (2000), Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) and Year 1 (2021). She is Distinguished Professor of Political Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York. Kevin McCaughey is a designer and founder of Boot Boyz Biz (established in 2015), a project-based research practice based in New York. Adam Michaels is a designer, publisher and editor, the cofounder of design studio Project Projects, and the founder of Inventory Press and design studios Project Projects and IN-FO.CO. He received the 2015 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communication Design.

Room for Thought

Seeing Making

Ferit Burak Aydar

Walter Benjamin ve pasajlar projesi

Görmenin diyalektiği

The dream of the twentieth century was the construction of mass utopia. As thecentury closes, this dream is being left behind; the belief that industrial modernization can bringabout the good society by overcoming material scarcity for all has been challenged by thedisintegration of European socialism, capitalist restructuring, and ecological constraints. Thelarger social vision has given way to private dreams of material happiness and to politicalcynicism.Developing the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mentalstate and an analytical concept, Susan Buck-Morss attempts to come to terms with mass dreamworlds atthe moment of their passing. She shows how dreamworlds became dangerous when their energy was usedby the structures of power as an instrument of force against the masses. Stressing the similaritiesbetween the East and West and using the end of the Cold War as her point of departure, she examinesboth extremes of mass utopia, dreamworld and catastrophe.The book is in four parts. "Dreamworlds ofDemocracy" asks whether collective sovereignty can ever be democratic. "Dreamworlds of History"calls for a rethinking of revolution by political and artistic avant-gardes. "Dreamworlds of MassCulture" explores the affinities between mass culture's socialist and capitalist forms. An"Afterward" places the book in the historical context of the author's collaboration with a group ofMoscow philosophers and artists over the past two tumultuous decades. The book is an experiment invisual culture, using images as philosophy, presenting, literally, a way of seeing the past. Itspictorial narratives rescue historical data that with the end of the Cold War are threatened withoblivion and challenge common conceptions of what this century was all about.

The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West

Dreamworld and Catastrophe

Revolution Today

Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation through a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. Historicizing the thought of 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.

Hegel, Haiti and Universal History

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 highlights new forms of international solidarity and revolutionary subjectivity that can break the impasse of neoliberal capitalism and reactionary nationalism.

Leonidas Donskis

Julian Stallabrass

This text documents and expands upon an exhibition programme of the same name; a project organized by the London based arts initiative Beaconsfield and Jutempus - a similar artists-led space in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Technology and Utopia

Ground Control

Cuauhtémoc Medina

Francis Alÿs

Francis Alys

Cuando la Fe Mueve Montañas

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. Reminding us powerfully that domination and consensus are maintained not by the lack of opposing ideas but by the disorganization of dissent, Thinking Past Terror presents the empowering idea of a global counter-culture as a very real possibility. If the language of a global, radically cosmopolitan Left is not presumed but its attainment struggled for, if the Leftist project is itself this struggle, then democracy defines its very core.

Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left

Thinking Past Terror

Origin of Negative Dialectics

la desaparición de la utopía de masas en el Este y el Oeste

Mundo soñado y catástrofe

"A treinta años de su primera edición en español, este libro ya es un clásico de la teoría y el pensamiento intelectual, así como una referencia ineludible en los debates en torno a la escuela de Frankfurt. En tiempos de la Alemania de la Social Democracia y de levantamientos estudiantiles, Susan Buck-Morss se propuso rescatar la figura de Adorno y releer la tradición filosófica de la teoría crítica desde sus orígenes históricos. Así, analiza el pensamiento de Adorno, su formación y el desarrollo de lo que denominó "dialéctica negativa", pero también su deuda para con Walter Benjamin, con quien compartió una amistad intelectual y muchas afinidades pero también entabló un extenso debate teórico. ¿Cómo la temprana filosofía no marxista de Benjamin proporciona la clave para el método dialéctico, materialista, de Adorno?, ésta es una de las preguntas que trata de responder Buck-Morss, quien ve en Adorno una figura central dentro de la revisión del marxismo del siglo XX." --Contratapa.

ORIGEN DE LA DIALECTICA NEGATIVA

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 "new humanism," 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.--publisher description.

Susan Buck-Morss

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