I love reading autobiographies and memoirs. Reading them has taught me much about the lives of others but also about myself.[1] Some autobiographies have allowed me to explore the many different ways in which people find themselves through reflexively writing. Becoming a person means gathering our experiences and memories, tied together with projects of ourselves. This is not a teleological trajectory; we do not know how our path will end and when. Quite the contrary: proceeding from the start leads one into ordering what initially looks like chaos. The autobiographical process is one of learning while discovering, retrieving, and most of all, creating something that can be called a life document of self-presentation. Critically reassessing our experiences while writing about them forces us to engage with others, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1953) once did in his Confessions. If the experiment of writing about oneself is successful, it happens like an epiphany: it reveals something new to even the writer. Consequently, this kind of work is not only an intellectual journey but also, most of all, a moral reckoning.

This reflection is tied up with the memoir written by my dear friend Peter Beilharz (2020), Intimacy in Postmodern Times: A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman. Indeed, Peter’s process of understanding himself not only allows us to learn about him as a person and as an intellectual, but it also explores some important dimensions of his sociological thinking in connection with his friend. This connection serves as a territory for creating frames of understanding and interpretative creation. Yet, like Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiographical work, Peter’s book does not stop at that. His friends from all over the world make an appearance, as do his mentors and teachers and his intellectual group in Australia, and he highlights the importance of Thesis Eleven as a journal first and as the ‘agora’ it now is.[2] Reading his memoir took me back to my first great experience with autobiographical discoveries when I read De Beauvoir’s (1963) Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, the first volume in her four-volume autobiography. After finishing it, I was convinced that I wanted to be a philosopher. Her experiential material allowed me to begin learning about myself because of what Hartmut Rosa (2019 has called resonance: ‘The resonant relationships established via the voice, moreover, turn out to extend between body and “soul” on the one hand, and between subject and world, on the other, and in both instances physical and symbolic resonances are mutually interactive’ (64). Peter’s long friendship with the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman reminds me of De Beauvoir’s great friendship with Zaza (a childhood friend from school) but also with Jean-Paul Sartre. Both are well combined in Peter’s friend Bauman. Peter’s own resonances to Bauman’s figure as an intellectual and a man allowed him to change his entire relationship to the world, to others he met along the way, and to his family and loved ones.

Peter’s self-presentation begins with a trip to England in 1992, when he met Bauman for the first time, therein starting Peter’s own journey to Ithaca. Like De Beauvoir, Peter narrates his mental trip through the changes he underwent, along with his views about sociology, and describes his commitment to one of the most extraordinary projects he led, a journal rightly called Thesis Eleven.[3] The story of the journal deserves a separate, dedicated paper, or a return to the 100^th issue of 2010 (Steinmetz 2010). The journal is woven throughout Peter’s memoir as an intellectual thread, from the very beginning when he starts his travels around the world and first meets Cornelius Castoriadis, whose journal Socialisme ou Barbarie had already made an impact on Peter’s intellectual interests. Peter likely thought that Thesis Eleven would have similar interests, profoundly embedded with the experiences of Marxism and the critique that came after the failed political experiments of socialism. Peter did not understand this critique as the refusal of socialism’s meaning but as a reappraisal of it, which he describes again through his own reading of Bauman’s work:

Bauman knows Marxism as a rich combination of cultures, and this is one reason why he does not walk away from it after the fall of the Wall, or as he grows older; for if you leave it behind, it will follow you, like a shadow or a stray. As I will argue later, the work of rethinking shifts on to the plane of the modern, so that Bauman’s is the most interesting of postmodernists as post-Marxists. Bauman is especially well placed among postmoderns in that he does not begin conceptually from an economistic reduction of society or modernity. Yet economy never disappears from his analysis either, and nor does suffering.

Beilharz 1998: 27

This is an extraordinary and contemporary way of recovering Marx through Bauman, as other thinkers such as Nancy Fraser (2022) are already claiming we should not read Marx just as an economist but in a broader and non-economist way that does not dissolve economy through culture or the other way around.

Peter shared his views about sociology with his friend, in a way similar to De Beauvoir’s relationship to Sartre. Peter’s stature is no less than that of the person he most admired – quite the contrary, Peter’s real appraisal of Bauman’s achievements and critical perspective make his sociology as compelling, if not more so, as Bauman’s. Michael Walzer (2002) has said something of this nature while considering the role of critique in De Beauvoir’s oeuvre.[4]

Peter’s retirement from La Trobe University, which coincides with the writing of his memoir, is tied up with the loss of his friend and the description of his current job at Sichuan University. Over the years, their relationship, founded on a rich combination of sociological mappings, conceptual thematization, and personal memories, had coalesced into love between the two friends. In his autobiography, Peter also reflects on his engagements with other famous sociologists, sharing several adventures and academic discoveries. Indeed, as he writes, he explains that ‘writing is a process of learning’ (Beilharz 2020: 2), and both are essential for understanding. He uses his retirement as his last chance to publicly say goodbye to Bauman, similar to De Beauvoir’s (1985) book Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Peter attempted to publicly ritualize this farewell, but I doubt very much that Bauman’s presence in his mind will ever fade. Peter will remain forever at his friend’s side, where he was during much of the life they shared together.

In this autobiography, we discover that Peter’s involvement with Bauman’s sociology is much more than their shared interests in photography, authors, films, and European critical theory versus American sociology. Peter first reflects on experiences about modernity, mixed with surprising encounters with various well-known people throughout each stage of his life, some of whom shaped his views. Peter captures his friend’s rising career and the creative stage when Bauman starts coining terms that will last forever, such as liquid modernity, which describes the permanently changing, ever-plastic nature of modern life. To interpret the transformation over time from postmodernity into liquid modernity, Peter asks his readers, ‘What is the project of Zygmunt Bauman?’ Then, he answers:

Many things. As his interpreter, among others, I have sought to characterize it variously as a critique of modernity, as a critique of order, as a Weberian kind of Marxism, an East European critical theory, as a sociology of surplus populations, and so on. [. . .] Modernity is excess; socialism was excessive, especially in its giganticist, Faustian ambitions, rebuilding the world of nature as well as the social; capitalism is excessive in its gargantuan appetite for labour, for endless growth, for sales, for exploitation in its protean drive to consume, to consume us and the planet as we consume it and especially those less fortunate than us, at home and afar. The critique of excess is a critique of waste, of human waste, of wasted lives.

Beilharz 2020: 54

The book also pushes back against simplifications of what sociology is for both. Peter, along with his friend, rejected that sociology could be the task of legislators (Beilharz 2020), for sociology is a kind of hermeneutics. While Bauman’s work addressed Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work, Peter also taught courses on this German founder of contemporary hermeneutics. Peter and Bauman both defined themselves as interpreters, as critical theorists. Peter judged some better than others, but he made it very clear that sociological interpretation was about finding the meaning and conceptualizing the changes that they were both exploring through capitalism, violence, neoliberal subjects, and the horrible transformation of educational institutions as proof that things have deteriorated. Both Peter and Bauman described the ills and the liquid-changing, fast-moving features of our society. It was not an easy task, nor ever final. Through their reflective and written comradeship, by uniting and exchanging views, both of them aimed to enhance their critical writing. Their conversations not only served to build up a critical sociology, but also to cement a deeper friendship, crystallized in so many books they individually wrote. That is their shared legacy, and Peter is proud of this common achievement.

By making every story about their encounters pleasurable, Peter made an effort to work through memory just as one works through the trauma of loss – in this case, his friend’s death. He explores the entire trajectory of his life to find a lasting memory about the meaning of this partnership. While narrating each stage, Peter noticed how his friend refused to be tamed as he grew older and more fragile.

Peter has also written a great deal about others, such as his teacher Jean Craig (Beilharz 2009) or Keith Tester (Beilharz 2023),[5] but he always returns to Bauman. Certainly, this friendship illustrates what Aristotle describes as philia: the real and most important way that equals love one another. Perhaps one may actually love a friend in ways that romantic love could never compete with. Most of us look for diverse ways to engage with others, forming multiple and unique relationships that, in harmony, fulfill our complex set of human needs. For Peter, Bauman elevated and joined respect, admiration, and commitment into a single relationship. This is why this memoir is so moving and so explicit about making friendship the most important relationship in one’s vital interests. Again, Sartre and De Beauvoir closely mirror this effort.

Their strong bond was deeper because both men were legendary outsiders: Bauman was a Jewish Polish man living in England, while Peter was an Australian (living in the antipodes[6]) with German origins. Peter never escaped the shadow cast by the Germans’ legacy and experienced difficulties meeting his relatives in Germany. Both men shared some outsider condition, yet the differences were special because Peter was keenly aware that Bauman kept writing about the meaning of our times after the Holocaust[7] and thought of it as a central part of modernity. Peter came to accept his roots once he understood what his friend meant by that and allowed him to process his German ancestry.

Peter ends up connecting Bauman to Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) work Homo Sacer. Agamben extends his views to the whole of modernity and ends up erasing features of it as opaque or insignificant—in my view, a mistake. Neither Bauman nor Peter would endorse that kind of negativity or nihilism; a normative view of better possibilities after disastrous events can be constructed. Yet in Peter’s essay ‘The Worlds We Create’ (Beilharz 2006), he connects Bauman’s theory to other figures such as Michel Foucault’s whose views on prison were connected to his idea of modernity, but ultimately, he chooses Agamben’s ‘Lager’ as the central feature of modernity. I think that overwhelming focus on this symbol of violence and death is wrong and misses modern conceptions of authority, democracy, and critique as categories clearly linked to Enlightenment, just as publicity as a right to demand accountability from the state[8] was too central for Immanuel Kant. Peter and Agamben do not acknowledge the existence of international law, democratic constitutions, and new ideas about justice, nor the growing consciousness about racism, sexism, gender oppression, and class inequalities. I believe modernity is not only about death but also about life.

It is strange that Peter’s interpretation of Bauman’s achievements is also a way of disentangling himself from his German origin, but it worked out well to keep interpreting his sociological debts and contribute inputs to Bauman’s own work. They cannot separate themselves easily anymore. But I find in Peter’s heritage the door for him to become independent from his friend’s legacy and to move into venues that remain unexplored.

Given my observation of his pessimism about modernity (his views are too sociological here), I do not know anyone more cosmopolitan, open to friendships, and kind than Peter Beilharz. Those characteristics are one of the great reasons that Thesis Eleven and its Centre have enjoyed such success. All of Peter’s friends, well-known sociologists and intellectuals are a testament to his plural and deep interests in life. Certainly, it has been a privilege for me to know him for at least thirty years. Peter has led us not by exhortation, as the last sentence of his memoir claims, but by example, and this might be the reason why Bauman called him ‘Peter the Great.’

References

Agamben G (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Roazen D. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Beilharz P (1998) Reading Zygmunt Bauman: Looking for Clues. Thesis Eleven 54(1): 25–36.

Beilharz P (2006) The Worlds We Create. Polish Sociological Review 155(3): 325–336.

Beilharz P (2009) Miss Craig Goes to Chicago. In: American Sociological Association’s 104^th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, United States, 8–11 August 2009.

Beilharz P (2020) Intimacy in Postmodern Times: A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.

Beilharz P (2023) Bauman and Tester at the Movies. In: Beilharz P and Wolff J (eds) The Photographs of Zygmunt Bauman. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press.

De Beauvoir S (1963) Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. New York: Penguin Books.

De Beauvoir S (1985) Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, trans. O’Brian P. New York: Pantheon Books.

Fraser N (2022) Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It. London and New York: Verso.

Kant I (1970) Perpetual Peace. In: Reiss H (ed) Kant’s Political Writings. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, pp. 93–130.

Lara MP (1998) Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

Rosa H (2019) Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, trans. Wagner JC. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

Rousseau J-J (1953) Confessions. New York: Penguin.

Steinmetz G (2010) Thirty Years of Thesis Eleven: A Survey of the Record and Questions for the Future. Thesis Eleven 100(1): 67–80.

Walzer M (2002) The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books.

Biographic Information

María Pía Lara is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. She has written several books, among them, Beyond the Public Sphere: Film and the Feminist Imaginary (2021), The Disclosure of Politics: Semantic Struggles Over Secularization (2013), Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment (2007), Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere (1998).  She is the editor of Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives (2001). Her books have been translated into various languages. She has published numerous articles on the subjects of populism, conceptual history, feminism, and critical theory. She is a Co-Director of the Colloquium of Critical Theory that takes place every year in Prague since 30 years ago. She is a member of the Editorial Board of Thesis Eleven. She can be contacted at mpl54here@yahoo.com.

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Notes

[1] I wrote a book about this fascinating way of self-presentation, titled Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere (Lara 1998).

[2] Peter Beilharz (2020: 51) explains that ’Much of this worked on the level of friendship, or resulted in friendships. It made of Thesis Eleven a little public sphere, an independent zone working first within the university system and then alongside and in collaboration with it, but free of its more toxic symptoms, and outside the more bizarre developments that came to characterize the university system across these times.’

[3] ’Via the journal Thesis Eleven, which we founded in Melbourne in 1980, in memory of a friend who had died young, we set out both to export our own views and to import those of others, though again, these terms make sense only after the fact. What were we thinking? Our sources were critical theory and Western Marxism, the philosophical trends tempered by a strong sense of place in the Antipodes and of the British Empire. Already we understood intuitively that culture, whether Marxism or rock music, worked through traffic. These cultures moved internationally, and needed to be placed historically. The slogan of ‘Transnationalism’ came late: in the beginning there was always the world system’ (Beilharz 2020: 7).

[4] Walzer (2002: 154) says, ’As a social critic, however, de Beauvoir undoubtedly comes first. There is nothing in Sartre’s wide-ranging work that equals The Second Sex or even de Beauvoir’s later, and much inferior, Old Age.’

[5] Keith Tester was the final doctorate student of Zygmunt Bauman.

[6] Peter explored Australian identity and the idea of the antipodes, of belonging neither here nor there, in his  work Thinking the Antipodes: Australian Essays (Beilharz 2015), as well as other publications.

[7] He writes, ’The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern, rational society and is therefore a problem of modernity itself. The Holocaust was a characteristically modern phenomenon that cannot be understood out of the context of cultural tendencies and technical achievements of modernity, even though fascism itself is political and contingent [. . .] Bauman, to simplify, sees Nazism as modern, rather than a ‘German’ accident to happen’ (Beilharz 1998: 30).

[8] Kant (1970: 126) says, ’”All actions affecting the rights of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is not compatible with their being made public” [. . .] For a maxim which I may not declare openly without thereby frustrating my own intention, or which must at all costs be kept secret if it is to succeed, or which I cannot publicly acknowledge without thereby inevitably arousing the resistance of everyone to my plans, can only have stirred up this necessary and general (hence a priori foreseeable) opposition against me because it is itself unjust and thus constitutes a threat to everyone.’