On Politics: The Fall of Orbán, the Rise of Magyar

Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and for all, from using the term “interior monologue” to describe the novel’s outbreaks of unassigned first-person narrative. This is not interior monologue: it’s exterior consciousness, embodied (or encorpsed) consciousness that has ruptured the membrane of conventional syntax.’ In this episode, Toms McCarthy and Jones discuss all that and more, including why Ulysses is both a ‘book to be read with relish’ and a ‘monumental event in the development of human consciousness’.

Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet supple syntax’ and ‘sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity’, Anderson also called Jameson a ‘great writer’. As Toril Moi wrote recently in the LRB, he was a great reader, too. Moi, who was recruited by Jameson to Duke University in the mid-1980s and remained his colleague there until his death in 2024, joins Thomas Jones on this episode to look back at Jameson’s earlier work, from Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961) to The Political Unconscious (1981), and to retrace the intellectual path he took to arrive at that milestone.

For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote recently in the LRB, ‘a veneer of romanitas was everywhere.’ But unlike in other parts of the former Roman Empire, it didn’t endure, as Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples arrived in Britain – perhaps invited at first, later as invaders – bringing their new customs, religion and language with them, and displacing, killing or subjugating the people who were already here. On this episode, Pablo joins Tom to explore the transition from Roman to British to Anglo-Saxon England between the sixth and eighth centuries. They discuss why none of the changes that took place was inevitable and why so few British words survive in modern English, even if the man said to be the first English poet was a cowherd with a British name.

In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have political agency in a culture that instantly commodifies ideas? Lea Ypi, a professor of politics at the LSE, has called for a return to the questions behind ‘committed literature’ that emerged in the middle of the last century. She joins James to talk about the ways in which the public sphere has changed since Sartre’s book and how Big Tech has assumed an authority like the medieval church, demanding a new form of enlightened resistance.

Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be described as fascist. Some have dismissed the label as rhetorical excess, while others have chosen to describe this new formation of right-wing politics as ‘post-fascist’. But, as Primo Levi wrote, ‘every age has its own fascism’, and in their recent book Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have identified ‘end-times fascism’ as a feature of our time, offering a portrait of arsonists and accelerationists who are knowingly pushing the world towards new and greater catastrophes.