Privacy, Secrecy, Intimacy, Human Bonds, Utopia—and Other Collateral Casualties of Liquid Modernity

Abstract

Alain Ehrenberg (1995), a uniquely insightful analyst of the convoluted trajectory of the modern individual’s short yet dramatic history, attempted to pinpoint the birthdate of the late-modern cultural revolution (at least of its French branch) that ushered in the liquid-modern world which we continue to inhabit, design as well as overhaul and refurbish day in, day out; a sort of Western cultural revolution’s equivalent of the salvo of the battleship Aurora that gave signal to the assault and capture of the Winter Palace and triggered the seventy years of the Bolsheviks’ rule. His choice was an autumnal Wednesday evening in the 1980s, on which a certain Viviane, an “ordinary French woman,” declared during a TV talk show and so in front of several million spectators, that her husband Michel suffers premature ejaculation and for that reason she’d never experienced an orgasm in the course of her marital life.