Zygmunt Bauman: Diasporic Terrorism

The IWM and the Wien Museum are pleased to announce that this year?s Pato?ka Memorial Lecture will be held by Zygmunt Bauman.

This lecture looks at the social consequences of the massive ongoing diasporisation of the world, a process by which the stranger becomes a next-door neighbor. One of the consequences is the ?glocalisation? of conflicts, where global conflicts appear in specific local circumstances, and local conflicts involve a global dimension, such as in the case of the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January this year. How can we turn instinctual mixophobia, the fear of the stranger, and the deep uncertainty a multicultural society brings, to mixophilia? How do we move from multiculturalism, which only means living aside, but not with each other, to multiculturality, in which cultural differences are not just acknowledged and frozen but serve to enrich every member of society?

Zygmunt Bauman, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Leeds, is regarded as one of the most influencal, critical theoretists of the present. Born in Poland in 1925, he was forced to exile twice: In 1939 he fled the advancing german troops to the Soviet Union and in 1968 he left Poland due to the anti-semitic campaign of that time. His publications comprise more than 40 books and include: Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), Intimations of Postmodernity (1990), Postmodern Ethics (1993), Liquid Modernity (2000), Society Under Siege (2002), 44 Letters from a Liquid Modern World (2010) and Collateral Damage (2011).