Seeing ↔ Making: Room for Thought

An experimental book that treats thinking as something made from images, combining the political philosopher Susan Buck-Morss's essays with visual material arranged by the designers Adam Michaels and Kevin McCaughey.

The 400-page softcover, published by Inventory Press in 2024, calls itself a picture-book of philosophy. It draws on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin and John Berger and uses montage and other visual techniques to explore the connection between seeing and making. Buck-Morss's pieces on visual culture, history, politics and aesthetics sit alongside the images, so that criticism and conceptual play share the page. The cover marks it as number 12 in the Innervative Spaces series.

Buck-Morss is a political theorist and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Professor Emerita at Cornell. Her earlier books include The Dialectics of Seeing (1989), on Benjamin's Arcades Project, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) and Year 1: A Philosophical Recounting (2021).