The Plague: Living Death in Our Times w/ Jacqueline Rose

Jacqueline Rose returns to the show to discuss her new book, The
Plague: Living Death in Our Times. We talked about what the
Covid-19 pandemic revealed about contemporary society and whether
the the initial wave of global solidarity provoked by the crisis
was purely a mirage. We also talked about the Ukraine crisis - how
Jacqueline connects 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. We also talked
about the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, and her refusal to
adopt a position of heroic innocence when supporting the allied
cause during WWII. 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.