Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor and chief of Current Affairs Magazine. It is my great privilege to be joined today by one of the left's finest writers. If you haven't read Richard Seymour's books, you really owe it to yourself to do so. He writes on many different topics.

You can pick up his classic book on Christopher Hitchens, Unhitched. You can pick up his book on the

Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon, Corbyn, the strange rebirth of radical politics. If you want to

understand social media, you could pick up the twittering machine.

And you should also, now I'll warn you, it's a bleak read, but it's a good read. You should also

pick up his latest book, Disaster Nationalism, The Downfall of Liberal Civilization,

available from Verso. And what I love about Richard Seymour's writing is that it combines sort of beautiful prose with depth of research.

It's simultaneously accessible enough to read if you're not an academic, but it doesn't sacrifice that richness of scholarship.

It ranges across and incorporates history, psychoanalysis, economic, sociology, anthropology.

I would describe his writing mostly as rich with ideas.

Richard Seymour, thank you so much for joining

us on current affairs. Thank you and thank you for that glorious introduction.

Well, I've been, oh, I forgot to mention the liberal defensive murder. That's probably my favorite

of your books, the liberal defensive murder. Pick up that one too. Yeah, it's an understudied book,

that one. It's one of my favorites. Yeah. Today we're here to talk

about disaster nationalism. And what you do is you help us understand. The reason I like your work,

and I'm telling people to read your work, is that you help us understand what is going on,

the historical currents of our time, that the world is a very confusing place. It needs the application of intellect.

That is what you do.

You think about the world.

You study the world.

You help clarify things for us.

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