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.

Although divided on a number of issues, the poststructuralists are united around certain philosophical concerns. These can best be summarized in terms of Nietzsche's rejection of philosophy as analytical and aiming at truth. Nietzsche and the poststructuralists following in his footsteps argue that meaning comes before truth and that no conceptuality is free from a certain amount of rhetoric. As a consequence, one has to examine how meaning is constituted through relations of power, through its embodiment in a concrete context or body, and so on. For poststructuralism, there is something inherently opaque about meaning, and as a result, truth is always contestable, as are conceptual distinctions.

Hoy organizes his discussion around the theme of resistance. The book is not an attempt to draw out the legislative or institutional consequences of poststructuralism in any detail. Instead, he wants “to see whether the various theorists can explain critical resistance, and whether their accounts point toward the possibility of resistance that is not merely reactive” (p. 6). When Hoy speaks about critical resistance, he is referring to emancipatory resistance to domination: “Critique is what makes it possible to distinguish emancipatory resistance from resistance that has been co-opted by the oppressive forces” (p. 2). His definition of critical resistance—and in particular his insistence on the possibility of distinguishing critical, emancipatory resistance from resistance in appearance only—is key to understanding the questions that he is addressing to the poststructuralist authors.

Hoy's treatment is informed by a worry, shared by other commentators, that poststructuralism is potentially relativist. The worry is that poststructuralism cannot answer questions such as: Why resist? Why resist this particular instance of domination? The flipside of this is poststructuralism's apparent inability to clearly distinguish domination from emancipation. As a corrective, Hoy proposes what he calls “post-critique,” by which he means a position that is antifoundationalist and self-reflexive, and can provide theoretical support for resistance to domination. Post-critique should be understood both as a historical description of the development of poststructuralism and as a normative program. In the first sense, postcritique comes after poststructuralism, and Hoy describes it as the way in which poststructuralism is, in fact, developing when it is trying to provide support for critical resistance. In the second sense, post-critique is an alternative to poststructuralism, that is, as what poststructuralism ought to develop into if it is to be ethically and politically relevant. Thus, each chapter ends with a section on post-critical attempts to overcome the potential problems that Hoy identifies in the poststructuralist approaches under consideration.

The author has written a very clear, lucid, and well-structured introduction to the problem of resistance and normative justification in poststructuralist philosophical and political thought. This is the real value of the book, and it will no doubt prove useful for teaching the politics of poststructuralism to advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Nonetheless, the book also has its limitations.

The first limitation is not necessarily a problem, but something one must nonetheless be aware of. Hoy tries to be fair to the theorists he is dealing with and criticizing, often giving them the benefit of the doubt and defending them against their critics. As such, he stays true to the largely hermeneuticist position he is coming from. Yet there are two ways in which his hermeneuticist standpoint shines through in his readings of the poststructuralists. First, he aims to establish the unity of their individual works. This is somewhat ironic in the context of poststructuralist thinkers, as these theorists precisely argue that there is no text, work, or author that is perfectly homogeneous. A poststructuralist reading, in contrast to Hoy's hermeneuticist reading, would aim to show the heterogeneity of a text, a work, or an author. Second, one must bear in mind that the standards by which Hoy judges the poststructuralist thinkers—their ability to give answers and to provide more or less clear distinctions—are the standards of a non-poststructuralist point of view, something that he also recognizes. They are certainly valid questions, and any philosophical and political tradition must engage with other traditions. Yet one should not lose sight of the questions raised by poststructuralist thinkers themselves that often put into question the very possibility of giving (conceptual, final, etc.) answers, as well as the possibility of establishing conceptual distinctions. While Hoy does gesture toward the problems involved in approaching poststructuralism in this way, Critical Resistance is sometimes limited by its more traditionally (hermeneuticist) philosophical outlook.

The best chapters are those on Nietzsche and Foucault, while those on Derrida and Laclau suffer from the fact that Hoy has not considered the most relevant literature in relation to their works. In both cases, and given the focus on resistance, Hoy could have chosen more relevant themes and literature. In Derrida's case, he considers the philosophical and political questions surrounding the concept of death. While his discussion of this in relation to resistance (and in relation to Derrida's critique of Martin Heidegger and Levinas) is interesting, there are more relevant themes in Derrida's work, including his relationship to Marx and to cosmopolitanism. In Laclau's case, Hoy focuses on the critique of Laclau by Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton; here it would have been more relevant to look at the critiques put forward by Norman Geras and Simon Critchley. In both the case of Derrida and of Laclau, Hoy could, thus, have gotten more out of their works in relation to resistance.