Intimacy in Postmodern Times

This book says farewell to Zygmunt Bauman by reflecting on the author’s thirty-year collaboration with him. Using his own archives and published work, Peter Beilharz establishes the nature of their friendship and the development of their respective intellectual projects on modernity, the postmodern and the present crisis. -- .

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Zygmunt Bauman was one of the most important social theorists of recent decades. He did major work on the Holocaust, the postmodern and much else, up to fifty-eight books in English on almost as many topics. In this book, Australian sociologist Peter Beilharz, Bauman’s collaborator for thirty years, recounts the details of their relationship, simultaneously charting the changes that have occurred in academic life from the 1980s to today. Friendship was one of the bonds that made Bauman and Beilharz’s intellectual collaboration possible. Though the two were worlds apart in terms of biography and place, their work together was defined by a certain kind of intimacy. Separated by a generation, they collaborated for a generation together. This book follows their story in touching detail while puzzling over Bauman’s rich yet contested legacy. -- .