Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
Free and open to the public
Summary: The disrupting forces of the present put pressure on the past, scattering pieces of it forward into unanticipated locations. No one owns these pieces. To think so is to allow categories of private property to intrude into a commonly shared terrain wherein the laws of exclusionary inheritance do not apply. A global transformation in collective imagination calls for History in a Communist Mode. The talk will provide exemplary cases of a communist inheritance of the past in regard to recent practices and histories of art.
Susan Buck-Morss holds the Jan Rock Zubrow '77 Professorship in Government, and is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory in the Department of Government, Cornell University. In 2010-2011 she holds a Distinguished Professorship at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York City. She is a member of the graduate fields of Comparative Literature and German Studies, and member of both the faculty and the graduate fields of History of Art and Visual Studies, and the School of Art, Architecture and Planning. Susan's earlier research and teaching encompass a range of areas including continental theory, specifically German critical philosophy and the Frankfurt School. In addition, she works on Islamism, sovereignty, globalization, visual culture and social theory, legitimacy and faith, and the economies of political vision. Susan’s newest book is Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), which will appear in Korean, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, and German translations. Her other books include: Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (Verso, 2003); Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (MIT Press, 2000); The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1989); and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (Free Press, 1977; 2nd ed., 2002).
