Episodes
Tuesday Feb 20, 2024
/393/ Emotion Sickness: The Politics of Feelings (I) ft. Nina Power
Tuesday Feb 20, 2024
Tuesday Feb 20, 2024
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Do we complain too little or too much? Should we be more repressed?
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Political passions were meant to be dead. Has anger overtaken apathy?
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Should we hate our enemies? Is that okay?
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Has contemporary society become hysterical?
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Why does everyone want to be a victim today? How does this relate to self-interest?
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Is evil a psychological concept?
For part two, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast
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What Do Men Want?: Masculinity and Its Discontents, Nina Power, Penguin Books
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Political Ponerology, Andrew Lobaczewski, Red Pill Press (pdf)
Tuesday Jan 30, 2024
/387/ Get Fungal to Save Culture ft. Lias Saoudi (Fat White Family)
Tuesday Jan 30, 2024
Tuesday Jan 30, 2024
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Why are the kids taking less drugs?
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Can we respond to our nihilistic times with nihilistic art?
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What is the nature of conformity today?
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How to challenge conformity without sneering at the masses?
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Is there a romantic revival going on? Why is Lias interested in Ivan Illich?
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If living cheaply in big cities is now very difficult for artists, will something new emerge from the provinces?
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Ten Thousand Apologies: Fat White Family & the Miracle of Failure, Lias Saoudi & Adelle Stripe, White Rabbit Books
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Punk's spirit is broken, Lias Saoudi, UnHerd
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Is modern medicine making us sick?, Lias Saoudi, UnHerd
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Forthcoming album: Forgiveness Is Yours
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/353/ Bunga Sells Out ft. Jason Myles - on music and the spectacle
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/359/ Apollo Gets High ft. Benjamin Fong - on drugs in America
Thursday Dec 28, 2023
[FROM THE VAULT] /161/ Culture is Bad for You ft. Mark Taylor
Thursday Dec 28, 2023
Thursday Dec 28, 2023
FROM THE VAULT: GEORGE'S PICK (1)
Tuesday Dec 19, 2023
/381/ Contemporary Art: Inane Spectacle & Pompous Discourse, ft. JJ Charlesworth
Tuesday Dec 19, 2023
Tuesday Dec 19, 2023
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Why is art no longer about beauty?
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Are we stuck between art that is either superficial or hyperpolitical?
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Why has there been a turn towards the mystical and irrational in art?
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How are ideas of the indigenous and the ecological represented in art today?
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Is there a romantic revolt against reason and is it new?
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The Return of Magic in Art, JJ Charlesworth, Art Review
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Gabriel Massan’s Decolonial Games, JJ Charlesworth, Art Review
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The naked truth about Marina Abramović – her ‘art’ is a joke, JJ Charlesworth, Telegraph
Tuesday Dec 12, 2023
Excerpt: /380/ Josephine’s Body Count
Tuesday Dec 12, 2023
Tuesday Dec 12, 2023
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Why did Scott choose to focus on Napoleon's relationship with Josephine?
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What is Scott trying to say, if anything, about Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars?
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Where are the depictions of youth, revolution and modernity?
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Are there any redeeming aspects to the film?
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What do we make of Phoenix's portrayal?
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Are we seeing the return of films about Great Men of History?
Tuesday Sep 26, 2023
Excerpt: /364/ The Eternal Sunshine of the Bourgeoisie
Tuesday Sep 26, 2023
Tuesday Sep 26, 2023
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‘A deranged masterpiece’: why you should watch The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian
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What Have the Bourgeoisie Done for us Lately?, Stephan Bertram-Lee, Sublation
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A Brief History of the Bourgeoisie, or We Are All Bourgeois Now, David Polansky, Strange Frequencies
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The Bourgeois(ie) as Concept and Reality, Immanuel Wallerstein, New Left Review
Tuesday Aug 01, 2023
Excerpt: /355/ F***ing and shooting are not the same
Tuesday Aug 01, 2023
Tuesday Aug 01, 2023
Links:
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Episode on Berlusconi biopic, Loro: UNLOCKED /87/ Berluscoming
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"The State I Am In", Christian Petzold (2000)
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
/353/ Bunga Sells Out ft. Jason Myles
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
Tuesday Jul 25, 2023
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Stakes is High: Addicted to the Spectacle, Jason Myles, Sublation
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Is The Contemporary Left A Lifestyle Brand?, Jason Myles, Sublation
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Virtual Insanity: A Freak Show for Left Media, Jason Myles, Sublation
Tuesday Jun 20, 2023
Excerpt: /347/ Feminists Touch Grass w/ Amber A’Lee Frost
Tuesday Jun 20, 2023
Tuesday Jun 20, 2023
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Feminism against Progress, Mary Harrington, Regenery
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Reactionary Feminist, Mary Harrington, Substack
Tuesday May 30, 2023
/344/ Don’t Do The Work ft. Ben Hickman
Tuesday May 30, 2023
Tuesday May 30, 2023
On work stoppages and work-doings.
Ben Hickman, published poet and senior lecturer in English at the University of Kent, joins us to discuss his project on different understandings of work, or rather, The Work.
What is The Work and why is it so pernicious? Ben wrote a piece for Compact regarding how the American poet and radical professor Audre Lorde transformed the way we think about work. We talk through the differences between work and The Work, how it impacted radical activism, and how middle class work became all about self-exploration.
Ben talks through a new book project on work and how it is understood culturally through figures such as Jackson Pollock, among others. Plus, what is happening with industrial relations on UK campuses, and how has radical politics unfolded in the Labour Party over the last few years?
Reading:
- Stop Doing The Work, Ben Hickman, Compact
- “Atlantis Buried Outside”: Muriel Rukeyser, Myth, and the Crises of War, Ben Hickman, Criticism, Vol. 57, No. 4 (Fall 2015)
Tuesday May 23, 2023
Excerpt: /342/ Maybe Don’t Abolish the Family? w/ Amber A’Lee Frost
Tuesday May 23, 2023
Tuesday May 23, 2023
On family abolition.
Amber A'Lee Frost joins us to talk through recent radical proposals to do away with the family as an institution. Author Sophie Lewis claims that "ever since the capitalist victory over the long Sixties, the shout for abolition of the family has been buried beneath a strange kind of shame”, but that now it’s back. Why?
What problems does family abolition address? And how do contemporary accounts sit in relation to earlier radical proposals by the Old and New Lefts?
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Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, Sophie Lewis, Verso
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Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family, Sophie Lewis, Verso
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Haven in a Heartless World, Christopher Lasch
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Vulnerability as Ideology, Peter Ramsay, The Northern Star
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The Lockdown Left: socialists against society, Philip Cunliffe, spiked
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Anti-Social Socialism Club, Dustin Guastella, Damage
Tuesday Apr 18, 2023
/334/ Cancellation is Cancelled ft. Norman Finkelstein
Tuesday Apr 18, 2023
Tuesday Apr 18, 2023
On the US cultural climate.
Renowned/notorious writer Norman Finkelstein joins us to discuss the themes of his latest and last book, I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!
What unites the leading intellectual proponents of wokeness today, people like Ibram X Kendi or Kimberlé Crenshaw? How do they differ from anti-racist and liberationist heroes of the past? What continuities are there between today's cancel culture and the politics of the New Left?
We discuss the definition of wokeness and ask whether we have already reached peak wokeness, and examine the emergence of anti-wokness.
Subscribe to the podcast: patreon.com/bungacast
Readings:
I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!: Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, Norman Finkelstein, Sublation
Tuesday Mar 28, 2023
/329/ Justice Warriors ft. Matt Bors & Ben Clarkson
Tuesday Mar 28, 2023
Tuesday Mar 28, 2023
On depicting dystopia.
Acclaimed cartoonists, writers and artists Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson join us for something a little different: to talk about their new comic book, Justice Warriors. Set in a grotesquely unequal world, a police procedural (of sorts) encounters an astrology-based social movement seeking justice.
We talk about how dystopian fiction often serves to manufacture consent and about how fiction can confront us with images of social decline. We also debate free will and determinism in a world that presents few opportunities, social justice warriors and politics that perpetuate the present, and why there is no 'pure' people set against the elite.
Links:
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The Nib - political satire & cartoons
Tuesday Jan 17, 2023
/314/ Shallow & Wrongheaded Filmic Squabbles ft. Maren Thom & Alex Dale
Tuesday Jan 17, 2023
Tuesday Jan 17, 2023
On aesthetic criticism & performance.
The hosts of a new podcast on film, Performance Anxiety, join us to talk about how a focus on performance can break through endless squabbles over wokeness and representation in film.
We also discuss our best and worst films of 2022.
Part two of this episode is at patreon.com/bungacast
Links:
- Performance Anxiety podcast
- The Greatest Films of All Time, Sight & Sound, BFI
- The Radicalization of the Film Canon, Adrian Nguyen, Quillette
Tuesday Jan 25, 2022
Excerpt: /237/ Three Articles: Italy, Ukraine, Matrix
Tuesday Jan 25, 2022
Tuesday Jan 25, 2022
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How the EU destroyed Italian democracy, Thomas Fazi & Paolo Cornetti, Unherd
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Boringly postmodern and an ideological fantasy, Slavoj Zizek, The Spectator
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Chartbook #70 Draghi for President?, Adam Tooze, Substack