Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2 cover art

Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2

COVID-19 Shakes the World & Chronicles of a Time Lost

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Pandemic! & Pandemic! 2

By: Slavoj Zizek
Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley
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Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World: We live in a moment when the greatest act of love is to stay distant from the object of your affection. When governments renowned for ruthless cuts in public spending can suddenly conjure up trillions. When toilet paper becomes a commodity as precious as diamonds. And when, according to Slavoj Žižek, a new form of communism—the outlines of which can already be seen in the very heartlands of neoliberalism—may be the only way of averting a descent into global barbarism. Written with his customary brio and love of analogies in popular culture (Quentin Tarantino and H. G. Wells sit next to Hegel and Marx), Žižek provides a concise and provocative snapshot of the COVID-19 crisis as it widens, engulfing us all.



Pandemic! 2: Chronicles of a Time Lost: Žižek delves into some of the more surprising dimensions of lockdowns, quarantines, and social distancing—and the increasingly unruly opposition to them by "response fatigued" publics around the planet. Here, Žižek examines the ripple effects on the food supply of harvest failures caused by labor shortages and the hyper-exploitation of the global class of care workers, without whose labor daily life would be impossible. Through such examples he pinpoints the inability of contemporary capitalism to effectively safeguard the public in times of crisis. Politics & Government Social Sciences Social Policy
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All stars
Most relevant
But the book is cool definitely good and interesting topic. The narrator sounds a bit like a sat nav its true.

Agree the narrator is not so good

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Like a thief in broad daylight is highly listenable due to great narration, and so highly engaging.
The narration of pandemic! Is awful and completely disengaging. Forget it, buy the book.

Unlistenable

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Unfortunately, the narrator for this was terrible - his patterns of speech were off-putting, his emphasis made following the text difficult, and his obvious unfamiliarity with a lot of what he was talking about led to distractingly incorrect pronunciations.

And this was a real pity because the text itself was excellent. Žižek is brilliant in short interconnected essays like this and his insights are urgently relevant, profoundly considered, globally connected, plainly explained.

Narration terrible, book great!

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I don’t know why the narrator has to read the manuscript in that manner, but it’s grating as hell. He sounds like a talking clock. He sounds like your Sat Nav. It’s unbearable.

An unfortunate choice of narrator

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In general some interesting insights on the covid pandemic and (some) contemporary geopolitics.

Overall there were some good insights and Zizeks analyses are worthwhile to listen to. The challenges that the reader will face with this book are:

- the content is based on newspaper articles and the topics don't connect all that well with one another
- Zizek is good at diagnosing issues and interpreting Lacanian/Foucaultian philosophy/psychology, but hopeless at predicting outcomes.
- Zizek pushes marxist outcomes as a inevitability without any good argumentation - it just somehow worms its way into the book.
- There are clearly other biases in his reasoning. One which predominates is that those who are not worried about the pandemic do not understand it. Implicit is that these people are unable to confront reality, something which I know to be patently false.

It is not an opus of thought and reasoning, but provides for good listening nonetheless.

Some good commentary, but only in fragments

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