Description
Book SynopsisWhen Freud wrote his classic Civilization and its Discontents, he was concerned with repression. Modern civilization depends upon the constraint of impulse, the limiting of self expression. Today, in the time of modernity, Bauman argues, Freuda s analysis no longer holds good, if it ever did.
Trade Review"For a penetrating discussion of the dilemmas which face postmodern cultural analysis, it is hard to beat."
Third Way "This book has important things to say ... interesting and thought-provoking." The Times Higher Education Supplement
"Humane, impassioned essays." The Times Literary Supplement
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Discontents - Modern and Postmodern.
1. The Dream of Purity.
2. Making and Unmaking of Strangers.
3. The Strangers of the Consumer Era: from the Welfare State to Prison.
4. Morality Begins at Home: or the Rocky Road to Justice.
5. Parvenu and Pariah - the Heroes and Victims of Modernity.
6. Tourists and Vagabonds - the Heroes and Victims of Postmodernity.
7. Postmodern Art, or the Impossibility of the Avant-garde.
8. On the Meaning of Art and the Art of Meaning.
9. Culture as Consumer Co-operative.
10. On the Postmodern Deployment of Sex: Foucault's History of Sexuality Revisited.
11. Immortality, Postmodern Version.
12. Postmodern Religion?.
13. On Communitarianism and Human Freedom, or How to Square the Circle.
Afterword: The Last word - and it Belongs to Freedom.
Notes.
Index.
