‘The Activating Presence’ -What Prospects of Utopia in Times of Uncertainty?

The work of Zygmunt Bauman is often classified by commentators and critics as either representing the thoughts of a proponent of postmodernism or as those of a valiant defender of a humanistic variant of Marxism. This article, however, focuses on a specific and often neglected leitmotif-sometimes hidden, sometimes explicit-running through Bauman’s work from the early years until the most recent publications, the utopian mentality. Bauman’s work is dissected along the lines of its contribution to utopian thought, however without it ever proposing a sketch of an ‘ideal society’ or ‘the common good’ as so many other utopian writers. Bauman is classified among the band of critical social thinkers-including the likes of Ernst Bloch and Leszek Kołakowski-for whom utopianism is an undying motif in human life, but who also, in varying degrees, fear the detrimental consequences of an actual implementation of Utopia. Moreover, they all, and especially Bauman, insist that the currently lived-through version of (in)human reality is not the only one possible and that we may still muster and imagine alternatives to the stubborn present