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On Covid state failure + responses to listeners.

We start off by discussing listener points and criticisms – e.g. is PMC a useful category? Is a counterculture a terrible idea? Were we wrong on Deleuze? More on the lockdown debate... – before featuring the second part of our discussion with Lee Jones on the coronavirus and state failure (from 45:30)

We look in depth at what went wrong in Western state responses to the pandemic, why they didn't follow their own plans, and compare this to South Korea's relative success.

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Gabo Goff

Another question i have is if we see wage growth in at least us but maybe England for low income people will pmc wage growth follow or will pmc wages stagnate, while their resentment against low income Americans grows. This would be Amazon warehouse workers all get raises but mid level managers don’t.

Ran Heilbrunn

Thanks for this. It was a great episode. I partly disagree with Phil about the text being a standalone piece – Deleuze calls it a postscript, which precisely means that it is not a standalone work, but a fragment of a broader discussion. Apart from that, I think that the most obvious tension between Deleuze and wokeness has to do with anti-essentialism. It's a major theme in Deleuze (and in poststructuralism more broadly), which is constantly being evoked today by the most ardent critics of identity politics – like Adolph Reed Jr. and the guy from Dead Pundits Society, for instance. But the purpose of comparing this tension to the relationship between Freud and modern therapeutic culture was actually to say something more general about the relationship between contemporary mass culture and the intellectual traditions of the past. These traditions are being bastardized and vulgarized by certain social and cultural dynamics that have little to do with their actual content. So, when trying to evaluate a thinker's work – whether it's Freud, Deleuze, or Fukuyama – one should avoid conflating it (or even uncritically associating it) with its representations in mass culture.