Susan Buck-Morss

"This book offers a reevaluation of the twentieth century. It argues that the disintegration of Soviet socialism marked the abandonment of the idea of mass utopia by both sides in the Cold War. One of the casualties of the end of that war was the shattering of dreamworlds of industrialization, mass culture, and historical progress that gave meaning to collective social life in East and West.". "Dreamworld and Catastrophe is an experiment in visual culture, using images as philosophy, presenting, literally, a way of seeing the past. Its pictorial narrative rescues historical data that with the end of the Cold War are threatened with oblivion, and challenges common conceptions of what the century was about. The book is written for the general public but will be of special interest to critical theorists, historians, philosophers, and artists."--BOOK JACKET.

"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. In a moving account that includes over 100 photos and images, Revolution Today celebrates the new political subjects that are organizing thousands of grassroots 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"--

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.