Legislators and Interpreters (1987), Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Modernity and Ambivalence (1991) are the foundational trilogy on which Zygmunt Bauman developed much of his later work (from postmodernity to liquid modernity and from “the Jew” to “the Stranger”). This article is a unique engagement with the trilogy and with the metaphorical thinking which relates the trilogy to Bauman's later work in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The article is divided into three parts focusing broadly on (...) Warsaw, Leeds, and Jerusalem as contextual “windows” for Bauman's Jewishness under the sign of totalitarianism, exile, and globalism. This is the first account of Bauman's Jewishness in relation to his extraordinary life and work and includes, for the first time, his little known “Jewish” essays which are placed next to his more general theories of modernity. (shrink)

This article focuses on the ethical quandary of Zygmunt Bauman’s interpretation of modernity as a double logic that heralds both emancipation and domination. After outlining his liberation sociology and the liquid moral ontologies he discerns, it argues Bauman’s solution to the consumption of ethics by consumerism demands too much, too late. Firstly, Bauman misappropriates Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction. The actual outcome is the dissipation of the Levinasian centrifugal self, whom Bauman wants to uphold as a cure for the (...) Nietzschean centripetal self. Secondly, as Daniel Miller shows, totalizing critiques of consumerism – such as Bauman’s – blind us to forms of moral self-constitution within consumption. And, thirdly, Bauman’s concept of the autonomous agent overlooks the power relations that are inherent to the constitution of subjectivity. Notwithstanding, Bauman highlights the need to articulate an ethics of freedom, and the article concludes with Foucault’s aesthetics of existence to meet this challenge. (shrink)

In this article, I critically engage Adriana Cavarero’s account of uniqueness via an analysis of her work on narrativity and violence. I suggest there is an ambivalence in Cavarero’s account of uniqueness: Cavarero argues both that uniqueness is susceptible to destruction, and that it cannot finally be annihilated. To make this clear I use Cavarero’s account to read a narrative offered by Miklós Nyiszli, of a woman who survived an Auschwitz gas chamber. I contrast this to Cavarero’s reading of Eurydice (...) and Orpheus, arguing that the ambivalence in Cavarero’s account can be resolved by thinking an excess proper to uniqueness. (shrink)