Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left - Rilegato

“Susan Buck-Morss enables us to discover the Islamists as our neighbours: neither as fundamentalist fanatics unable to cope with modernity, nor as the exotic authentic Other, but as people sharing the same global predicament as ourselves. Based on this insight, she breaks out of the boring multiculturalist problematic of respect for and openness towards the Other, shifting the focus to the common struggle in which we should all participate beyond the cultural divide. If this book is not allowed to explode in political debates, the contemporary Left can close the store and erase itself as a relevant political agent!”—Slavoj i ek

“With one act of outrageous theoretical intervention, Susan Buck-Morss surpasses the thick psychological barrier that has for a long time discouraged critical theorists from thinking creatively in an Islamist context. She now joins her colleagues from the other side of the divide, Muslim intellectuals who also for quite some time have tried to converse with critical theory. Thinking Past Terror is the inaugural site of a creative conversation that is no longer limited to a disciplinary and area specialists and marks the commencement of a critical discourse on the most vital issues of our terrorized times.”—Hamid Dabashi

Susan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory at Cornell University. She is the author of Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project and The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute.