Check out this lecture by Brian Holmes and then check out his lecture series at the European Graduate School. The link is the first lecture. After that I'm not sure the order but it's well worth the time, even out of order. If you're not familiar with The European Graduate School, its program is focused heavily on Marx and Lacan with a faculty made up of a pretty awesome line up of contemporary theorists; Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben and so on. One of the things that makes Brian Holmes so interesting to me is that he brings a background in economics and political science into his critique. So in the way that many of his contemporaries with backgrounds in Lacanian psychoanalysis treat society as a composition of pathologies and symptoms, Holmes is able to use things like statistical analysis and a deep understanding of the way markets actually work to illustrate today's scene of declining neo-liberal capitalism. It's a really fresh and interesting perspective and I think it offers a lot of reasons to believe there are all kinds of instances of and possibilities for meaningful radical political activity.
