Life in Fragments Essays in Postmodern Morality

by Bauman, Zygmunt

• ISBN13: 9780631192671
• ISBN10: 0631192670
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-06-12
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Life in Fragments is a continuation of the themes and motifs explored in Zygmunt Bauman's acclaimed study, Postmodern Ethics (Blackwell, 1993). Described by Richard Sennett as a major event in social theory, Postmodern Ethics subverted the pieties of subversion which rule the postmodern imagination, arguing for an ethic of being with the Other, beyond the fashionable imperative of anything goes or the deconstruction of identity through difference.

Author Biography

Zygmunt Bauman (19 November 1925 – 9 January 2017) was a Polish sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of Poland by a political purge in 1968 engineered by the Communist government of the Polish People's Republic and forced to give up his Polish citizenship to move to Israel. Three years after he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971 and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later Emeritus. Bauman was one of the world's most eminent social theorists, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.

Table of Contents

Introduction: In Search of Postmodern Reason	1	(10)
Morality without Ethics	10	(34)
Society: the operation cover-up
Facing the unfaceable
Weaving the veil
The veil pierced
The veil torn up
Morality uncovered
Ethical laws, moral standards
Forms of Togetherness	44	(28)
Being-aside, being-with, being-for
Convention and commitment
The unbearable uncertainty of being-for
The good is in the future
Broken Lives, Broken Strategies	72	(33)
Breaking out, into prison
Acceleration and its discontents: `quality of life'
Acceleration and its discontents: `identity'
Modern life as pilgrimage
The world inhospitable to pilgrims
The pilgrim's successors
What chance of morality?
What chance of polity?
A Catalogue of Postmodern Fears	105	(21)
Fears of Panopticon
From purveyors of goods to sensations-gatherers
From health to fitness
The body under siege
From handling to tasting
The Stranger Revisited - and Revisiting	126	(13)
Two strategies of living with strangers
The stranger, as seen by the flaneur
The stranger ante portas
The stranger, Janus-faced
Violence, Postmodern	139	(24)
The drifting frontier
The ways and means of separating deeds and morals
Adiaphorization, the postmodern version
Violence, do-it-yourself style
An inconclusive conclusion
Tribal Moralities	163	(60)
The Body as Task	163	(16)
Guarding the frontiers of civilization
Border control privatized
Racism, Anti-racism and Moral Progress	179	(13)
The administration of strangers
Moral progress?
The new world disorder, or respacing the world
Insecurity and cruelty
A Century of Camps?	192	(14)
Modernizing cruelty
`Antisemitism' Reassessed	206	(17)
Jews are unlike the others
Jews mean the impossibility of order
Changing times, changing places
Morality and Politics	223	(66)
Intellectuals in the Postmodern World	223	(20)
Modern origins of the intellectuals
The `intelligentsia' of the civilizational periphery
Estrangement and engagement
The social dislocation of intellectuals
Towards a recomposition?
Europe of Nations, Europe of Tribes	243	(13)
An Epilogue: Threats and Chances, Old and New	256	(33)
The story so far...
... and the beginning of a new story
The chances of moral togetherness
The new community?
Between hope and despair
New ethics in search of new politics
Can we do it? Will we do it?
Index	289