Susan Buck-Morss

The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (1977)

Her first book was based on her dissertation and included research in the Adorno archive. It remains in print as a seminal work for the understanding of the Frankfurt School thinkers and the paradoxes that followed the adoption of their theories by American political thought.^[12]

The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989)

In this book, Buck-Morss reconstructs the Passagen Werk (Arcades Project), a massive assembly of notes for a project that Walter Benjamin did not live to write. With the use of images of objects and spaces of mass culture, Buck-Morss undertakes the exercise of expanding on the allegory of the Paris Arcades that fascinated Benjamin to form a sharp critique of capitalism.^[13]

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2000)

In this book, Buck-Morss develops the dreamworld as an analytical concept to understand the moments of mass utopian imagining of the 20^th century, showing how closely the capitalist utopia of consumption and socialist utopia of production resembled each other in their goals of industrial progress. In three chapters on the Dreamworlds of Democracy, History and Mass Culture, Buck-Morss examines, also with the use of images, how both the United States and the Soviet Union produced large-scale utopian dreamworlds through architecture, spectacle, consumer culture, and political imagery.^[14]

In the last chapter, “Afterward”, Buck-Morss situates the book historically through her decade-long collaboration with philosophers and artists in Moscow, her visits to Eastern Europe, and her engagement with the Russian language and culture during the fall of the Soviet system and its transition to capitalism.^[14]

Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (2003)

Written in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the book examines political Islam, Western secularism, and the limitations of leftist theory in responding to contemporary forms of violence and global conflict. Drawing on both Western critical theory and Arab intellectual debates, the book argues for a rethinking of universalism of the Enlightenment and calls for dialogue across political and cultural divides.^[15] The concerns of this book led to her membership in the UNESCO-initiated, Brazilian-supported Académie de la Latinité, under the directorship of Candido Mendes, Rio de Janeiro.^[16] [17]Respecting the diversity of cultures that characterizes the history of Latin countries, the Académie held yearly meetings with Arab intellectuals and others, in order to counter the ideological polarization that followed the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009)

In her seminal work that influenced debates in philosophy, post-colonial studies, and global intellectual history, Buck-Morss reinterprets the Hegelian schema of the master-slave dialectic in light of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804).^[18] Expanding on her earlier essay "Hegel and Haiti" (2000),^[19] she argues that Hegel must have known about the successful slave revolt in Saint-Domingue through contemporary reports, and that his philosophical account of freedom recognized the historical context of the anti-colonial revolt.

The book challenges Eurocentric readings of modern philosophy by situating a foundational moment of European thought within a global anti-colonial revolutionary framework. Buck-Morss contends that universal history must be understood as shaped by events outside Europe, and that the Haitian Revolution and other global developments, especially in the colonial world, should be recognized as central to modern political consciousness rather than peripheral to it.^[18]

Revolution Today (2019)

In this book, Buck-Morss asks the question: “What does revolution look like in the first decades of the 21^st century?”.^[20] With the use of photographic evidence, she shows the reader how people continue to act politically after the mass political disillusionment of the 20^th century. By reflecting on recent global uprisings and mass protests, Buck-Morss attempts to reflect and reframe spontaneous collective action outside of institutionalized party organization or ideological orthodoxy and conformity.

Year 1: A Philosophical Recounting (2021)

Buck-Morss reexamines the origin stories of Western civilization based on the most recent historical research, discovering serious distortions in readings and translations of first-century texts (by Flavius Josephus, Philo of Alexandria, and John of Patmos) on which politically charged understandings of the past have been based. All three writers thought of themselves as Jews. All wrote  in koinē, a word we translate as “Greek,” but in first-century Greek means “common.” All relied on the same koinē version of the Pentateuch/Torah. The project extends her method of universal history by tracing the origins of an arbitrarily conceived first century A.D., challenging the claims of contemporary collectives to exclusionary ownership of historical time and territory.^[21]

Seeing–Making–Room for Thought (2024)

Seeing–Making–Room for Thought (2024) is a collaborative project by Buck-Morss with graphic artist Kevin McCaughey and publisher Adam Michaels. The title refers to the relationship between thinking and the forms of presentation. Buck-Morss and her collaborators experiment with layout, typography, and image-text relations as part of their argument about how knowledge is produced and shared.^[22]