You're listening to the Politics Theory of their podcast.

My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is the writer and cultural critic Jacqueline Rose.

We spoke about Jacqueline's new book, The Plague, Living Death in Our Times.

We talked about what the COVID-19 pandemic revealed about contemporary society and whether

the initial wave of global solidarity provoked by the crisis was purely a mirage since the pandemic

so dramatically highlighted and exacerbated existing inequalities. We also talked about the Ukraine

crisis, how Jacqueline connects to the themes of war and pandemic

in the book, and how Vladimir Putin's brutal invasion has had the troubling consequence

of appearing to redeem the foreign policy and security establishments of the United States

and Britain, the authors of some of the worst military crimes of recent decades.

We also talked about the philosopher and mystic Simone Vei and her refusal to adopt a position

of heroic innocence when supporting the Allied cause during World War II and her insistence

on being cognizant of the crime of French colonialism while nevertheless supporting the fight

against Nazi Germany.

And finally, we talked about

Sigmund Freud's concept of the death drive and how it was informed by his own encounter with

a pandemic, the so-called Spanish flu, that took the life of his daughter Sophie in 1920.

Today's episode is brought to you by PTO's supporters on Patreon and also by Verso Books,

who have lots of great left-wing titles perfect for PTO listeners. One you might like to check out is The Party's

Over, The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives, from Thatcher to Sunac by Phil Burton Cartilage.

Today it is not a question of if, but when. What we are watching is the collapse of the most

successful political party in Europe. Despite winning the December 2019 general election,

...