Susan Buck-Morss Research Articles

Fanon’s Postcolonial Critique of Hegelian Recognition and Buck-Morss’ Haiti Thesis

This philosophical investigation interrogates the relationship between G.F.W. Hegel’s concept of the master-slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit and the critique and reformulation of it by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. As a means of contextualization and expansion of Hegel’s original textual account, I consider Susan Buck-Morss’ seminal defense through grounding the dialectic in Hegel’s possible historical knowledge of the Haitian Revolution. I conclude that despite a compelling picture, Buck-Morss’ insights are unable to fully vindicate Hegel from the rebukes of Fanon, and as a result, Hegel’s phenomenology necessitates a concrete analysis of the actual conscious experiences of the racialized and colonized subject in order to realize its aims.

Universality as a Historical-Political Problem: On the Limits of Buck-Morss’ Conceptualisation of Universality

ABSTRACT The present article revolves around the notion of universality and its relation to freedom and temporal orientation in contemporary political thought, with a focus on Susan Buck-Morss' notion of universality. The purpose is twofold. Firstly, I discern and critique the historico-political premises of her approach. Secondly, I suggest an alternative historico-political approach to universality addressing the drawbacks of her approach. I present three objections to her approach. Drawing on Arendt's distinction between liberation and the practice of freedom, I first present a critique of the conceptualisation of freedom on which Buck-Morss' approach hinges, arguing that she overemphasises the moment of liberation. Thereafter, I turn to her reflections on historical orientation. My third objection concentrates on Buck-Morss' concept of universality. As a heuristic tool to expound on my critique, I activate the distinction between fictive and ideal universality as suggested by Étienne Balibar. I contend that Arendt's distinction between liberation and the practice of freedom efficiently elucidates the questions at stake in Balibar's discussion, as well as how his distinction points to the limits of Buck-Morss' argumentation. Ultimately, I contend that these critical remarks open up for a more dialectical approach to universality as a historical-political problem.

Two Metaphysics of Freedom: Kant and Hegel on Violence and Law in the Era of the Fall of Liberal Democracy

The article attempts to rethink the legacy of Kant and Hegel in light of the problematic of law, violence and universality. It is also an explication of this legacy in the context of two contemporary insights into historical fate of our Eurocentric civilization—of Achille Mbembe and of Susan Buck-Morss. First, I consider the Kantian foundation of Rechtstaat in the light of Benjamin’s classic Critique of Violence and Mbembe’s contemporary critique of colonial power. Then I propose a new account of the central concept of Hegel’s Logic—i.e. the transition from necessity to freedom— from the same perspective, supplemented with Derrida’s interpretation of Benjamin, and Žižek’s reading of Hegel. The dialectic of modality from Hegel’s Science of Logic seems to be an underappreciated thread in this respect, insofar as Hegel’s idea of universality or freedom is founded on his ontology and critique of law.

Upheavals in Black Thought

Upheavals in Black Thought

What Has Happened to the Left Revolutionary Project?

This interview documents an email exchange between Susan Buck-Morss, Jonathan Flatley, and Helen Petrovsky on the occasion of the publication of Buck-Morss’s Revolution Today.

Hegel, Haiti and revolution: the post-colonial moment

Susan Buck-Morss’s argument that the Haitian Revolution embodied the most universal aspect of the French Revolution, namely the quest for universal freedom, relies on the supposed references to Haiti in the master–slave dialogue in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The revolution’s lodgement at the core of this foundational text of Enlightenment universalism is, for her, about as convincing a demonstration as one can have of the universal significance of the Haitian Revolution. Marxists have opposed her venture, and demonstrated their hostility to post-colonial thinking, principally by claiming that the master–slave is an expression of European class conflict. This paper agrees with Buck-Morss that the Haitian Revolution critically affirmed the principle of universal freedom and, indeed, pushed the revolution in France and Europe in a radical direction. A better affirmation of the universal significance of the Haitian Revolution than the thoughts of Hegel is possible. The latter do not actually provide such affirmation, because racism, Eurocentrism and a hostility to political radicalism are fundamental aspects of Hegel’s thought. The alternative affirmation can be found in Marxist analysis. This paper outlines such an analysis, and concludes that post-colonialism of Buck-Morss’s sort is no substitute for the perspective provided by historical materialism.

The Arcades’ affinities: excursions into the corners and crowds of Johannesburg’s pasts

This article joins the excursion in which the ‘Secret Affinities’ workshop organizers took participants on through the city of Johannesburg in March 2017 as the precursor to its deliberations. Given the intent of the workshop to follow the ‘endeavour’ of Walter Benjamin’s construction of a world of ‘secret affinities’ ‘in unpredictable, undisciplined ways’ this tour with its predetermined sites and routes seemed to be an anomaly. My intent on taking part in this excursion in the article is to offer the reader some notes, or what Susan Buck-Morss in referring to Benjamin’s Arcades project invokes as half a text; observations, images, reflections and guides to the city, traversing spaces of the excursion in a defined, regulated and incessantly punctuated temporal encounter, sometimes called an itinerary. On the imaginative journey in this article these fragments are at hand not so much as to guide the reader from the workshop venue – a themed guest house and museum, restored and renamed Satyagraha House in 2011, where the lawyer Mohandas Gandhi and the architect Hermann Kallenbach lived at the beginning of the twentieth century – through the city, but rather as a means to both orient and disorient the reader to their own historical and political associations of place. Accompanying the reader on this journey contained in this article is Mr. Benjamin – inserted as a creative, discursive character in my writing – who has written extensively on cities, their spatial configurations and social connotations. He sometimes intervenes and makes comments. But he is determined not to appear as the bearer of expertise. His intention is to establish a point of vision between being of the crowd and standing apart on the street corner, to become, as he wrote in an essay reflecting ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, ‘already out of place’.

Clothing Degree Zero: A Late Reading of Barthes’ Fashion ‘System’

Drawing upon Roland Barthes’ posthumously published notebooks from his 1974 trip to China, in which he remarks upon the ‘complete absence of fashion. Clothing degree zero’, this article offers a ‘late’ reading of Barthes’ interest in fashion, suggested here as a form of writing. In reference to the late works, specifically Barthes’ penultimate lecture course on the Neutral and Travels in China, supplemented by François Jullien’s comments on Barthes’ trip to China (regarding the use of the term ‘blandness’), as well as mention of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Chung Kuo-Cina (which Barthes viewed with ‘methodological’ interest), it is possible to draw together a reading of fashion as a neutral form. As a final step, reflection is given to Susan Buck-Morss’ reading of ‘history as passing’, as discontinuous moments (whereby fashion is symptomatic of such transformations). Barthes’ writerly mode – which works upon incidental details (also found in the work of Antonioni) – is revealed to be a pertinent method.

Walter Benjamin, Advertising, and the Utopian Moment in Modernist Literature

Walter Benjamin, Advertising, and the Utopian Moment in Modernist Literature Ben Moore (bio) In a well-known entry in Convolute G of the Arcades Project (“Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville”), Walter Benjamin describes the violent impression made upon him many years before by an advertisement for Bullrich Salz seen on a streetcar in Berlin, as well as his loss of memory of all details of this advert and their sudden return in full force upon seeing a sign bearing the words “Bullrich Salz” in the window of a “miserable café” in the same city.1 No one since seems to have been able to locate the original advert—Max Pensky admits he spent ten years searching for it—but it is described by Benjamin as follows: In the foreground, a horse-drawn wagon was advancing across the desert. It was loaded with sacks bearing the words “Bullrich Salt.” One of these sacks had a hole, from which salt had already trickled a good distance on the ground. In the background of the desert landscape, two posts held a large sign with the words “Is the Best.” But what about the trace of salt down the desert trail? It formed letters, and these letters formed a word, the word “Bullrich Salt.” Was not the preestablished harmony of a Leibniz mere child’s play compared to this tightly orchestrated predestination in the desert? And didn’t that poster furnish an image for things that no one in this mortal life has yet experienced? An image of the everyday in Utopia? (Arcades, 174).2 A better translation of this final question, whose German original is “ein Gleichnis für den Alltag der Utopie,” is “A likeness for the everydayness of utopia?,” as provided by Susan Buck-Morss in The Dialectics of Seeing (1989).3 As well as “likeness,” Gleichnis can be translated as “image,” “allegory,” or “parable,” so the [End Page 769] precise nature of the link between the poster and utopia, which Benjamin in any case phrases as a question, remains open. It is the nature of this relationship, and where it might lead in terms of analyzing advertising in modernist literature, that I aim to explore in this article.4 Benjamin’s fragment has been analyzed by critics in various ways, including by Ruth Iskin as part of a discussion of late nineteenth-century poster design; the authors of Benjamin’s Arcades: An unGuided Tour, who read it as an “imitation of Proust” akin to surrealism in the way it tears objects from their normal setting and juxtaposes them with others in order to illuminate the everyday; Esther Leslie, who also reads it as a Proustian involuntary memory, which connects personal and collective history and is dependent on the modern city as a place of meeting points and thresholds; and Max Penksy, whose extended reading associates it with Benjamin’s Berlin texts of childhood memory, as does Leslie, and positions it as a combination of dialectical image and commodity image in which heterogeneous times “telescope together” and “intermingle image-contents of a primaeval past with those of a utopian future” (Buse et al., Benjamin’s Arcades, 113; “Geheimmittel,” 123).5 While I find these analyses useful, especially Pensky on the play of presence and absence in the passage, I want to move away from previous readings and instead take Benjamin’s fragment as a spur to explore what I would like to call the “utopian moment” in modernist literature. I focus not on Marcel Proust or French surrealist writing, but on a selection of English and American modernist texts concerned with urban life, in which advertising confronts city dwellers with something like the everyday utopianism Benjamin describes. The examples I choose come from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem (1919). The politics of these texts varies (though it is worth noting that both Dos Passos and Wright were involved with communism at the time of writing), but all of them share the insight that when advertising suddenly and unexpectedly writes or rewrites the urban landscape, it turns language into a set of hieroglyphs...

The GDR: Thirty Years On, Incidentally

Introduction

Wandering and Placemaking in London: Iain Sinclair’s Literary Methodology

Wandering and Placemaking in London: Iain Sinclair’s Literary Methodology

Transformacja w sztuce w postkomunistycznej Europie

The paper focuses on the ways of visualizing political and economic transformation in the works of artists from post-communist Europe mainly in the 1990s. Those works, which today, in a wide geographical context, may be interpreted as problematizing the idea of transformation, were often originally appropriated by such discourses of the post-transformation decade as the art of the new media and technology (Estonia), performance (Russia), feminism (Lithuania), body art (Hungary), and critical art (Poland), which marginalized the problem of transformation. Analyses of the works of artists from Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Russia make it possible to determine and problematize the poles of transformation in a number of ways, pointing at the inadequacy of those poles which traditionally spread from the end of totalitarian communism to democracy identified with free market economy. By the same token, they allow one to question their apparent antithetical character which connects the transformation process to the binary structures of meaning established in the period of the Cold War. The presented analyses demonstrate that the gist of the transformation was not so much the fall of communism, which is surviving in the post-1989 art of East-Central Europe due to the leftist inclinations of many artists with a Marxist intellectual background, but the collapse of the binary structure of the world. Methodologically inspired by Boris Buden, Susan Buck-Morss, Marina Gržinić, Edit András, Boris Groys, Alexander Kiossev, and Igor Zabel, they restore the revolutionary character of 1989 and, simultaneously, a dialectical approach to the accepted poles of the transformation. An example of ideological appropriation, which may be interpreted as problematizing the political transformation, is Trap. Expulsion from Paradiseby the Lithuanian artist Eglė Rakauskaitė. The first part of the paper focuses on Jaan Toomik’s May 15-June 1, 1992, interpreted in the theoretical terms proposed by Marina Gržinić and Boris Groys as a work of art that visualizes the concept of post-communism as excrement of the transformation process. Placed in the context of such works as In Fat(1998) by Eglė Rakauskaitė, 200 000 Ft(1997) by the Hungarian artist Kriszta Nagy or Corrections(1996-1998) by Rassim Krastev from Bulgaria, Toomik’s work is one of many created at that time in East-Central Europe, which thematized the transformation process with reference to the artist’s body. Krastev’s Correctionsproblematizes the transformation as a process of self-colonization by the idiom of the West, as well as a modification of the utopia of production, one aspect of which was propaganda referring to the body, changing it in an instrument that transformed the political order into a consumerist utopia where bodies exist as marketable products. The part titled, “The Poles of Transformation as a Function of the Cold War,” focuses on A Western View(1989) by the Bulgarian artist Nedko Solakov and This is my blood(2001) by Alexander Kossolapov from Russia. In a theoretical context drawn from the texts by Zabel, Buden, and Ekaterina Degot, Solakov’s work has been interpreted as problematizing the transformation understood as refashioning the world, no longer based on the bipolar division into East and West. The paper ends with an analysis of Cunyi Yashi, a work of the Hungarian artist Róbert Szabó Benke, which problematizes the collapse of the bipolar world structure in politics and the binary coding of sexual identity. In Szabó Benke’s work, the transformation is represented as rejection of the binary models of identity – as questioning their role in the emergence of meanings in culture.

Infância destruída: as bestas e o ano zero da civilização

O presente artigo tem como finalidade propor algumas análises a respeito dos filmes Beasts of no nation e Germania anno zero. Utiliza-se de alguns conceitos desenvolvidos pelo filósofo Giorgio Agamben como chave de leitura dos filmes. Também indica, a partir das colocações de Susan Buck-Morss, a pertinência do cinema não apenas como meio de análise das conjunturas históricas contemporâneas, mas como via de acesso alegórica a determinadas categorias que constituem a dimensão da política contemporânea. Por fim, a partir das análises dos filmes, aponta como a questão da infância (entendida também como infância da humanidade) parece ser fundamental para pensar a inextricável conexão entre civilização e barbárie.

Our Opium Wars

The prescription opioid crisis in the United States is among the worst human-caused public health disasters in modern history, with over 500,000 dead and by some estimates almost 5% of the American population ‘misusing’ these drugs. This article supplies some unusual resources for understanding that crisis and the way it inherits a legacy of empire, now transfigured for a corporate age. From the museums funded by the sale of these drugs to the British-led Opium Wars to the present-day racialised dimensions of the epidemic, much can be gained from dwelling with its tangled and haunted complexities. The article concludes with a consideration of Susan Buck-Morss’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s meditations on the aestheticisation of politics in an age of what she calls capitalist anaesthetics.

Architectures of the invisible hand: envisioning capital in Joseph Conrad’s Singapore

ABSTRACTIn recent years, critical attention has shifted away from the subject of Conrad’s imperial politics and towards his representation of late nineteenth-century global capitalism, which extends panoramically from the business houses of London, Brussels and San Francisco to commodity frontiers as diverse as Malay tobacco plantations, African ivory lands and Latin American silver mines. This paper explores Conrad’s engagement with capitalism and its representability within his portrait of late nineteenth-century Singapore in the wake of a financial crisis. Drawing on Susan Buck-Morss’s ‘Envisioning Capital’, as well as Fredric Jameson’s essay on architecture and finance, ‘The Brick and the Balloon’, the paper reads Conrad’s proto-postmodern urban landscape and porous, ethereal architecture as evidence of the visual and representational difficulties generated within a major colonial ‘laboratory’ of liberal economics. Yet, by shifting in focus from the city to its outlying plantations, Conrad is seen to confront abstract capital with territory, ether with matter, and free-market narratives of the ‘invisible hand’ with the absent cause of racialized and indentured plantation labour.

Hearing the Contradictions: Aesthetic Experience, Music and Digitization

If, as Susan Buck-Morss (2003) suggests, aesthetic experience is an occasion for “making critical judgments about not only cultural forms but social forms of our being-in-the-world,” or if it is linked, in David Hesmondhalgh’s (2013) account, to the possibilities of collective flourishing, potential changes in the nature of that experience merit critical attention. This article reflects on the ways in which these social or ethical dimensions of the aesthetic experience of music are affected by digitization. It moves from a discussion of aesthetic experience as a form of encounter that refers to a common world, to consideration of recent work in music sociology that engages themes that emerge from that discussion: aesthetic judgment, and the question of difference and commonality. With illustrations from focus group interviews, I suggest that the quantization associated with digital environments is altering the cultural form of aesthetic judgment, just as personalization is changing the meaning of “difference” in this context. The essay is intended as a disclosive critique that takes as its primary object not the world observable through thick description or hermeneutic interpretation of actual cultural practice, but a world evoked through critical reflection on its actual and potential constellations of meaning.

Traces of a Revolution

Traces of a Revolution

Julia Gaffield, editor. The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy.

In the last couple of decades few fields in the historiography of the Americas have grown so much in quantitative and qualitative terms as that of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). In fact, we have passed from a “silenced revolution” to what I would call an “over-interpreted revolution” (including in Susan Buck-Morss’s interpretation of Hegel and what she called “the Haitian connection” in “Hegel and Haiti,” an article that caused an uproar in the academic world when it was published in the year 2000 [Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4: 821–865]). Atlantic history has a lot to do with this increasing interest in the only slave revolution in the history of mankind that has ever succeeded. By itself, this uniqueness should be reason enough to give to the Haitian Revolution a central place in the history of the modern world. At times, however, granting that place seems to imply ignoring the Spanish American Revolutions that began to take place only five years after Haiti declared its independence. This is what Julia Gaffield does in the first page of the preface: “Scholars recognize the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions as part of a broader set of changes occurring across the Atlantic World” (vii). This exclusion is in line with something Gaffield and David Armitage seem to support in their introduction when they affirm that due to the fact that the Haitian Revolution did not share the methods or the aims of the American and French cases, it might therefore “be more productive to see the Haitian Revolution as the first of the Latin American Revolutions” (17). The problem here, of course, is that the Spanish American Revolutions did not share either the methods or the aims of the Haitian Revolution.

Postelection surrealism and nostalgic racism in the hands of Donald Trump

This article builds on interlocutor comments to “The Hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, Gesture, Spectacle” (Hall, Goldstein, and Ingram 2016), a study published before the 2016 presidential election that analyzes Trump’s use of derisive humor in the Republican Party primaries. We move this earlier analysis forward by examining the ways that Trump’s semiotic displays on the campaign trail now inform the material policies of the Trump administration. Our response reflects upon two currents that characterize this postelection moment: first, the surreal mix of gendered and racialized nostalgia embedded in Trump’s iconography and message, and second, the intensification of white racism as Trump’s rhetoric of patriotic nationalism becomes government. Bringing the responses of our esteemed interlocutors into conversation with the philosophical work of Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss, and Susan Sontag and the historical work of Carol Anderson, we suggest that Trump’s spectacle of governing embraces sexual transgression, civil lawlessness, and excessive opulence, all of which encourage a pro-white semiotics and a return to racisms past.

Dialectics of the Real

Emily Jacir’s Material for a Film (2005 – ongoing), an installation about the Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter, was criticised by The New York Times art critic Ken Johnson for demonstrating politically correct sentiments but lacking aesthetic originality. Through an analysis of this and other artworks by Jacir, this article aims to account for the significance of the artist’s work by looking beyond art theory and towards questions of ideology. The paradox of performing critical memory through archival work is addressed in terms of the contradictions of publicity within what Jodi Dean refers to as communicative capitalism. Whereas scholar Susan Buck-Morss calls for ethical witnessing in the context of a global public sphere, the author proposes that leftist solidarity requires the avoidance of ideologies that emerge unwittingly from social constructionism and discourse theory.