Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique

Extract

Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique. By David Couzens Hoy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 288p. $35.00.

This book examines the value of different so-called poststructuralist philosophical approaches to normative justification and political resistance. The label “poststructuralist” is a contended one, and David Couzens Hoy provides a useful discussion of it. He includes discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche as the most important precursor to poststructuralism, of the poststructuralists Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Ernesto Laclau, and of Pierre Bourdieu, Emmanuel Levinas, and Slavoj Žižek, who, according to Hoy, are not poststructuralists. As such, the book discusses a variety of poststructuralist and related approaches and provides a good introduction to the potential problems with these approaches with regard to normative justification of resistance to domination.