Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (review)

David Couzens Hoy’s Critical Resistance is “a historical and topical guide” to poststructural theories of “emancipatory resistance to domination” (2). Tracing the origins of poststructuralism to a Nietzschean genealogical critique, which begins to be expressed in Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Critical Resistance takes up some of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek and emphasizes the important position that concepts of resistance occupy in poststructural thought. Hoy discusses these poststructural thinkers in relation to some of the theories of Sarah Kofman, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Judith Butler, Martin Heidegger, Terry Eagleton and others. Indeed, it is Hoy’s ability to contextualize poststructuralism in relation to both contemporary theory and the philosophical tradition that makes Critical Resistance such a strong examination of poststructuralism.