Quote from Zygmunt Bauman (Does ethics have a chance in a world of consumers?, 2008, p. 25):

To sum up the seminal departures discussed thus far: The presently emergent human condition augurs an unprecedented degree of emancipation from constraints—from a necessity experienced as coercion and therefore resented and rebelled against. This sort of emancipation tends to be experienced as the reconciliation of Sigmund Freud’s “pleasure principle” with the “reality principle,” and therefore as the end of the epoch-long conflict that in Freud’s view made civilization a hotbed of discontent.

Emancipation from constraints? this to me is an appearance: forced consumption everywhere, masking as freedom, as long as there is enough oil in the gears. Ok though on the success of hybridity or liquidity for the inhabitants of this purportedly new world, and of those who make themselves liquid: suave, multi-sided, couleuvres? Metaphors: anchor (setting, lifting) instead of roots (sinking, uprooting, disembedding), etc. Ok also, but hasn’t this been seen already by Augustine et al (being a pilgrim, being on the road, with inns here and there).
Emancipation from territorial adscriptions, ok of course, but towards what? See Exodus and its tales of alienation. My emancipation as an intellectual from local dependencies is also an enslavement to new tools, manières de faire, ever-changing desires…. Bauman doesn’t seem to indicate anywhere (of what I’ve read) that it has become obvious (or is easily visible if one follows one’s eyes) that we are entirely made of the work, thinking, living of distant, invisible, uncontactable others. Incarnation and its mysteries unfolding faster than ever. Oh yes, he does so pp. 71–3: globalization as ethical challenge, and here is a passage:

Within the world’s dense network of global interdependence, we cannot be sure of our moral innocence whenever other human beings suffer indignity, misery, or pain. We cannot declare that we do not know, nor can we be certain that there is nothing we could change in our conduct that would avert or at least alleviate the sufferers’ fate. We might be impotent individually, but we could do something together, and “togetherness” is made of and by the individuals. The trouble is—as another great twentieth-century philosopher, Hans Jonas, complained—although space and time no longer limit the effects of our actions, our moral imagination has not progressed much beyond the scope it has acquired in Adam-and-Eve times.

Surprising or perhaps not so surprising that the story of Jesus is wholly absent here. Everything said here was apparently already felt in a little corner of Roman Galilee, and Bauman’s sentences should read: “Within the world’s dense network of global interdependence, we can be sure of our moral guilt whenever….” Or how does one explain food prices in our supermarkets? clothes’ price? energy prices above all? the infrastructures of Europe and northern America, etc.? But Bauman seems to think it can be fixed by new imaginative, transformative (of course), polity networks. New forces are needed (pages 76–77). Whence?