Susan Buck Morss

On February 11, 2011 – the day Hosni Mubarak resigned the office of President of Egypt – Chris Mansour interviewed Susan Buck-Morss, professor of political philosophy and social theory at Cornell University and author of The Origin of Negative Dialectics and Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, on behalf of The Platypus Review. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation. Chris Mansour: What were the stakes of introducing Critical Theory into a postmodern culture that widely considered its ideas obsolete? [Read More]

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009 SUSAN BUCK-MORSS’S RECENT OFFERING Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, takes critical aim at two targets: what she identifies as Eurocentric models of universal history, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rejection of any notion of universality whatsoever in favor of the postmodernist “plurality of alternative models” (ix). What she proposes instead is “a universal history worthy of the name” (x), by which she means one that does not give the European Enlightenment and its direct heirs a monopoly on the historical project of freedom. [Read More]