Judith Butler, the premier gender theorist is interviewed in Guernica Magazine, she covers the Obama Administration, the wars in middle east, the abortion debate and many other issues.

Excerpt:

Judith Butler: A president is part of a team, and he chooses those with whom he will act in concert. Summers and Geithner were choices, and they were ones that clearly put technocratic free market thinking above questions of social justice and the kind of political thinking it would take to implement norms of justice. One has to be competent at implementing one policy or another. But there is always the question of which policy, and this is a matter of principle.

Butler is rarely this accessible, read entire interview

From Jodi Dean @iCite

Perhaps the most pathetic attribute of the Left today is its vigorous defense of the Right’s most special treasure, liberal democracy. Even as the ‘coalition of the willing’ (a name whose multilateral pretense failed to disguise US militarism) wages aggressive, preemptive war in Iraq in the name of liberty, democracy, and human rights, so does the Left invoke precisely the same ideals in its attempted opposition. Likewise, key values in Left politics at the millennium—flexibility, multiplicity, diversity, participation, interconnectivity, and a creative, aesthetic relation to identity—are urged by globalized communicative capitalism as its fundamental prerequisites. It’s no wonder, then, that there is no coherent opposition to capitalism or to liberal democracy as its political form—nothing is opposed. One can therefore say without exaggeration that the Left today names precisely this nothing that opposes. It occupies the place of an absence, an absence of alternatives, an absence of vision, and, ultimately, an absence of opposition.

Via: POSTHUMAN DESTINIES
A six part video series produce for Dutch TV in January 2010. The show begins in Dutch but after the brief introduction the entire program is in English. The video makes for a good introduction to Zizek’s political views and takes it’s title from his new book Living in the End Times