Płynność i retrotopia

Abstract

The article focuses on Zygmunt Bauman's last, posthumously published book, in which he claims that the emergence of retrotopia is interwoven with the deepening gulf between power and politics that is a defining feature of our contemporary liquidmodern world, the gulf between the ability to get things done and the capability of deciding what things need to be done, a capability once vested with the territorially sovereign state. True to the utopian spirit, retrotopia derives its stimulus from the urge to rectify the failings of the present human condition, though now by resurrecting the failed and forgotten potentials of the past. Imagined aspects of the past, genuine or putative, serve as the main landmarks today in drawing the road-map to a better world. Having lost all faith in the idea of building an alternative society of the future, many turn instead to the grand ideas of the past, buried but not yet dead. Such is retrotopia, examined by Zygmunt Bauman. Having devoted himself to the "liquidity" of our life most of his books after 2000, Bauman in the last years seems to have felt that this fluidity is unbearable and that there must be an attempt to stop the process. Such a defense of today’s precariousness and uncertainty becomes the myth of the past.