Questo breve saggio si interroga sulla paradossale coesistenza degli ideali dell'Illuminismo nel Settecento con una pratica della schiavitù che non è mai stata concretamente messa in discussione: la libertà, proclamata con forza in Europa era calpestata nelle colonie, dove l'economia si reggeva sul sistema schiavistico. In questo contesto, quando Hegel elabora la dialettica servo-padrone, mostra una cecità tipica dell'epoca o si tratta, al contrario, di un tentativo di denuncia di questo stato di cose? In una successione di punti, e dopo una breve digressione sul contesto storico e filosofico, Susan Buck-Morss avanza l'ipotesi secondo cui Hegel è riuscito a spostare un discorso filosofico, astratto, verso una opposizione dialettica ispirata e inscritta nella realtà. Secondo l'autrice, Hegel ha davvero portato la filosofia della libertà fuori dalla sfera teorica; ha reso il razionale reale. Se il suo periodo berlinese lo riportò verso un conservatorismo che successivamente ha potuto giustificare molte teorie eurocentriche, e nonostante un razzismo culturale permanente, Hegel sembra non di meno aver avuto un momento di lucidità di cui qui Buck-Morss sottolinea la portata nell'elaborazione di un progetto di libertà universale.

The very successful first volume followed the 2009 conference called in response to Alain Badiou’s “communist hypothesis,” where an all-star cast of radical intellectuals put the idea of communism back on the map. This volume brings together papers from the subsequent 2011 New York conference organized by Verso and continues this critical discussion, highlighting the continuing philosophical and political importance of the communist idea, and discussing how to take these essential ideas forward in a world of financial and social turmoil.

Contributors include Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Susan Buck-Morss, Jodi Dean, Adrian Johnston, François Nicolas, Frank Ruda, Emmanuel Terray and Slavoj Žižek.

In The Museological Unconscious, Victor Tupitsyn views the history of Russian contemporary art through a distinctly Russian lens, a "communal optic" that registers the influence of such characteristically Russian phenomena as communal living, communal perception, and communal speech practices. This way of looking at the subject allows him to gather together a range of artists and art movements--from socialist realism to its "dangerous supplement," sots art, and from alternative photography to feminism--as if they were tenants in a large Moscow apartment. Describing the notion of "communal optics," Tupitsyn argues that socialist realism does not work without communal perception--which, as he notes, does not easily fit into crates when paintings travel out of Russia for exhibition in Kassel or New York. Russian artists, critics, and art historians, having lived for decades in a society that ignored or suppressed avant-garde art, have compensated, Tupitsyn claims, by developing a "museological unconscious"--the "museification" of the inner world and the collective psyche.

Renownedcritical theorist Susan Buck-Morss argues convincingly that a globalpublic needs to think past the twin insanities of terrorism andcounter-terrorism in order to dismantle regressive intellectualbarriers. Surveying the widespread literature on the relationship ofIslam to modernity, she reveals that there is surprising overlap wherescholars commonly and simplistically see antithesis. Thinking PastTerror situates this engagement with the study of Islam among criticalcontemporary discourses-feminism, post-colonialism and the critique ofdeterminism.

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.

The dream of the twentieth century was the construction of mass utopia. As the century closes, this dream is being left behind; the belief that industrial modernization can bring about the good society by overcoming material scarcity for all has been challenged by the disintegration of European socialism, capitalist restructuring, and ecological constraints. The larger social vision has given way to private dreams of material happiness and to political cynicism.Developing the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept, Susan Buck-Morss attempts to come to terms with mass dreamworlds at the moment of their passing. She shows how dreamworlds became dangerous when their energy was used by the structures of power as an instrument of force against the masses. Stressing the similarities between the East and West and using the end of the Cold War as her point of departure, she examines both extremes of mass utopia, dreamworld and catastrophe.The book is in four parts. "Dreamworlds of Democracy" 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 Mass Culture" 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 of Moscow philosophers and artists over the past two tumultuous decades. The book is an experiment in visual culture, using images as philosophy, presenting, literally, a way of seeing the past. Its pictorial narratives rescue historical data that with the end of the Cold War are threatened with oblivion and challenge common conceptions of what this century was all about.

Walter Benjamin's magnum opus was a book he did not live to write. In The Dialectics of Seeing, Susan Buck-Morss offers an inventive reconstruction of the Passagen Werk, or Arcades Project, as it might have taken form.Working with Benjamin's vast files of citations and commentary which contain a myriad of historical details from the dawn of consumer culture, Buck-Morss makes visible the conceptual structure that gives these fragments philosophical coherence. She uses images throughout the book to demonstrate that Benjamin took the debris of mass culture seriously as the source of philosophical truth.The Paris Arcades that so fascinated Benjamin (as they did the Surrealists whose "materialist metaphysics" he admired) were the prototype, the 19th century "ur-form" of the modern shopping mall. Benjamin's dialectics of seeing demonstrate how to read these consumer dream houses and so many other material objects of the time - from air balloons to women's fashions, from Baudelaire's poetry to Grandville's cartoons - as anticipations of social utopia and, simultaneously, as clues for a radical political critique.Buck-Morss plots Benjamin's intellectual orientation on axes running east and west, north and south - Moscow Paris, Berlin-Naples - and shows how such thinking in coordinates can explain his understanding of "dialectics at a standstill." She argues for the continuing relevance of Benjamin's insights but then allows a set of "afterimages" to have the last word.Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory at Cornell University. The Dialectics of Seeing is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy.