A talk by Susan Buck-Morss, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, CUNY Graduate Center

Discussant: Peter Hitchcock, Associate Director, the Center for Place, Culture and Politics

April 28, 2011 from 6.30 – 8.30
Recital Hall
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue @ 34th street
Free and open to the public

In the early 1920s, Lukács lamented the fact that modern society had lost every image of the whole. Influenced by Hegel, he believed that the “totality” could only be seen from a historical perspective, grasped as a sequence of stages that led from feudalism to capitalism and beyond. “Seeing Global” proposes an alternative, one that requires a reappropriation of the cultural heritage. 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.