Cover Page

To Zygmunt, to whom I owe everything.
To Aleksandra, Lydia, Anna,
Irena, Maurice and Mark:

I am so grateful that life made our paths cross.

THOMAS LEONCINI

Born Liquid

Transformations in the Third Millennium

Passages from the Italian translated by Lucinda Byatt

Zygmunt Bauman

Thomas Leoncini











polity

On 21 February 2017, an international seminar held at the Kolegium Artes Liberales of the University of Warsaw, Poland, was held to celebrate Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity. I was asked to talk about my husband’s last works and I began by describing the joint project with a young man to write about the younger generations, those who are Born Liquid. I told the audience about how they corresponded and how the young man was committed to finishing the book after Zygmunt’s departure into ‘liquid eternity’. The lecture hall was packed to overflowing, and an even wider audience was listening online, linked from various parts of the world. There was enormous interest. I believe there could not be a better augury for the long voyage undertaken by this little book.

ALEKSANDRA KANIA BAUMAN

With the demise of my individual body, bodily existence will not really end. It will continue, much as it started before the appearance of my body and before the beginning of my own thinking, before my ‘entering the world’. It will continue in the form of the bodily presence of other people.

ZYGMUNT BAUMAN, Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies*