Bøker av Susan Buck-Morss

"A reconsideration of the first century, before there were chronological centuries, and how it troubles our contemporary boundaries between religion, philosophy, and law"--

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

Reclaiming the first century as common ground rather than the origin of deeply entrenched differences: liberating the past to speak to us in another way.Conventional readings of antiquity cast Athens against Jerusalem, with Athens standing in for "reason" and Jerusalem for "faith." And yet, Susan Buck-Morss reminds us, recent scholarship has overturned this separation. Naming the first century as a zero point--"year one"--that divides time into before and after is equally arbirtrary, nothing more than a convenience that is empirically meaningless. In YEAR 1, Buck-Morss liberates the first century so it can speak to us in another way, reclaiming it as common ground rather than the origin of deeply entrenched differences.Buck-Morss aims to topple various conceptual givens that have shaped modernity as an episteme and led us into some unhelpful postmodern impasses. She approaches the first century through the writings of three thinkers often marginalized in current discourse: Flavius Josephus, historian of the Judaean war; the neo-Platonic philosopher Philo of Alexandria; and John of Patmos, author of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible. Also making appearances are Antigone and John Coltrane, Plato and Bulwer-Lytton, al-Farabi and Jean Anouilh, Nicholas of Cusa and Zora Neale Hurston--not to mention Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Kristeva, and Derrida.Buck-Morss shows that we need no longer partition history as if it were a homeless child in need of the protective wisdom of Solomon. Those inhabiting the first century belong together in time, and therefore not to us.

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

Argues that the global public needs to think past the twin insanities of terrorism and counter-terrorism in order to dismantle regressive intellectual barriers. Surveying the literature on the relationship of Islam to modernity, this work reveals that there is surprising overlap where scholars commonly see antithesis.