Critical Resistance.

• Author: Kuswa, Kevin
• Position: Book Review

Critical Resistance. By David Couzens Hoy. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2001; pp. vvi-274. $35.00.

What is critical resistance? How and when should it be encouraged? Can it even be encouraged? These questions and their infinite corollaries haunt and often define post-structural theory and practice. David

Couzens Hoy, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has targeted this intersection in both refreshing and repetitive ways in his book, Critical Resistance.

Hoy wants to examine the notion of resistance through a genealogical method borrowing from Foucault and Nietzsche. Hoy attempts to break down some of the initial or originary categories that inspire resistance by arguing that fighting such binary categories also serves to keep them intact. When children act out against their parents they reinforce the assumption of authority built into the relationship. Hoy's quest to rethink critical resistance is a noble endeavor, but the standard list of post- authors that Hoy deploys to organize the entire project (Nietzsche, Foucault, Bourdieu, Levinas, and Derrida), along with the way he abstracts their writings, works to limit the creativity and value of Hoy's analysis. In the same way that genealogy can go only so far until some actual historical work occurs, Hoy has assembled a valuable primer for productive critical work and research without mapping new terrain himself.

To organize the project around this select group of authors and to speak front and through their collective academic voice is to constitute a poststructuralist authority without an in-depth examination of the personal and political background of the authors themselves. And, if the goal of the project is to invigorate critical resistance within the academy, why not select a list of social movement organizers and human rights activists? Hoy cites Derrida to make the argument that critical resistance can be seen as a deconstructive approach that challenges dogmatism and unquestioned assumptions. What exactly does that entail? Despite Hoy's willingness to cite the university as a located site of subjectivity and criticism, he does not provide examples of the practice and method he advocates, choosing instead to label it "deconstructive genealogy" and surround himself with abstract quotations from celebrity poststructuralists. He is aware of his sweeping descriptions, even warning against optimistic expectations, but he stops short of lived resistance or...