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Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique
This book serves as both an introduction to the concept of resistance in poststructuralist thought and an original contribution to the continuing philosophical discussion of this topic. How can a body of thought that mistrusts universal principles explain the possibility of critical resistance? Without appeals to abstract norms, how can emancipatory resistance be distinguished from domination? Can there be a poststructuralist ethics? David Hoy explores these crucial questions through lucid readings of Nietzsche, Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, and others. He traces the genealogy of resistance from Nietzsche's break with the Cartesian concept of consciousness to Foucault's and Bourdieu's theories of how subjects are formed through embodied social practices. He also considers Levinas, Heidegger, and Derrida on the sources of ethical resistance. Finally, in light of current social theory from Judith Butler to Slavoj Zizek, he challenges "poststructuralism" as a category and suggests the term "post-critique" as a more accurate description of contemporary Continental philosophy.Hoy is a leading American scholar of poststructuralism. Critical Resistance is the only book in English that deals substantively with the topical concept of resistance in relation to poststructuralist thought, discussions of which have dominated Continental social thought for many years.
- GenresPhilosophy
Hardcover
First published February 20, 2004
About the author
David Couzens Hoy
9 books3 followersDavid Couzens Hoy is Distinguished Professor of Philosphy Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 9, 2010
Originally appeared in Literary Research / Recherche Litteraire
The central question of resistance, a question itself that functions as resistant to a hasty solution, is one that preoccupies both the thematic scaffolding and the particularities of Hoy’s ambitious undertaking. Critique distinguishes between two types of resistance: emancipatory, and oppressive or thaumaturgical. The derelict variety that wends its way through the contemporary discourse is precisely the facile assumption that resistance is ontologically viable in and of itself, and that the question of resistance need not be reposed; however, as has been the case among more conscientious theorists, the notion of resistance is not one we can afford to take for granted, and so the normative face emerges insofar as we ought to perform a deconstructive genealogy of the term itself to better ascertain the breadth, salience, and durability of the concept.
The reactive brand of resistance which presupposes the very structure to be resisted (thereby, through negation, legitimizing the existent authority of the oppressive) needs to be forgotten, in a sense. That is, to forget the dichotomous split between resistor and resisted, in a Nietzschean spirit of active forces going to the limit of what they can do irrespective of the constraining and curtailing reactive forces which seek to inhibit the burgeoning effect of critique-creation. Of course, without careful attention to the particularities of the consequences and origins of such a clarion call, we risk such a brazen statement of pluralism to become dogmatic. It is Hoy’s intention to give ample sensitivity to this very question: is resistance at all possible without sinking back into a reactive mode --or, genealogically speaking, being muddled by propped up origins and universals that can gain no purchase on the question of resistance itself? Moreover, we encounter the very difficulty of resistance in poststructuralist discourse, a discourse that has occasionally prided itself on having been able to resist dialectical monoliths and transcendent universals, in that such a discourse would be required to be honest about its own claims in being able to resist even its own methods. That is, to stay true to its heritage of privileging more affirmatively construed differences (in the case of Deleuze and Foucault) or to engage in a process of interminable negations that keep in play productive undecidabilities within regulated philosophemes and epistimemes (in the case of Derrida and “deconstruction” at large), the very discourse of resistance existent in these discourses would open passage to a “folding back”, a resistance to its own process of delineating the question of resistance, undermining this process by an infinite regress of questioning the question.
The lynchpin of poststructuralist social theory and its constructions of understanding resistance is, acknowledges Hoy, critique. Hoy demonstrates critique in practice through a gamut of notable discourse participants, appending his own “post-critique” at the close of each chapter as though modifying or embroidering upon a living discourse, posing critical reflections on the gains of each “micro-movement”. Although his coverage of Derrida is fairly extensive on the issue of resistance, his passages on Deleuze are occasionally a bit light, not to mention a few lacunas that would have bolstered a Deleuzian view of resistance such as Difference and Repetition (1968) wherein is found a much more sophisticated critique of Hegelianism and a maturation of Deleuze’s thought on Nietzsche (although the text’s project itself is never explicitly directed at Hegel for fear of confirming Hegel in opposing him). In addition, although Difference and Repetition lacks the overt polemical flair of Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), it is an exemplar text in demonstrating how Deleuze utilizes his three syntheses of time and grounds his transcendental empiricism as a means of illustrating the innate ontological character of resistance as it manifests itself as the play of forces. Moreover, it might have proved additionally useful if Hoy engaged Deleuze’s collaborations with Guattari, especially A Thousand Plateaus (1980) where the issue of resistance in terms of the nomad and the re/deterritorialization of space would have provided another articulation and hue to the discussion. As well, the sole-authored works by Guattari would have made an intriguing rejoinder on the issue of power/resistance and language, recalling Guattari’s view that State and language are inseparable insofar as it becomes an imbricated power play where the rules of the discourse are determined from the beginning, to which we are forced to respond in accordance to these rules (therefore raising the very ethic of discourse once again). However, these omissions, no doubt already considered by Hoy in the interests of brevity rather than a covert strategy, do not endanger the principle aim of the text; namely, to sleuth out those theorists in particular moments who engaged the issue of resistance either directly or obliquely. And, it is to Hoy’s credit that he constructs a tidy overview of an entire discourse, delaying only at the points of maximum salience on the issue of resistance.
The delicate balance of rejecting universal frameworks to describe resistance and a concern to ground some kind of theoretical critique that will be viable despite this resides in the heart of “post-critique”. A good example to demonstrate this tightrope walk is the issue of the manifesto. According to this problem, manifestos would themselves be impossible insofar as they would be trapped by the inherent problematic of “resistance” and that the socially prescriptive character of manifestos unilaterally refuse to purse the matter of their own written act of resistance to the origin of their value. A more recent example would be Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) that functions like a manifesto, yet artfully keeps itself critically distant from prescribing actions, and instead seemingly assigns the “hope” of the future to what they call “the multitude.” However, the text still operates as a manifesto, and so must also be subject to the criticisms that would follow such an enterprise. In seeking to explain the very phenomenon of the manifesto as a textual instrument meant to inspire “resisting attitudes” against some almost phantomized dominant Other (however determinate or amorphous the structure of this Other) would be to undermine the promised, positive benefit of the manifesto itself. This would make the case of the manifesto as an instrument of resistance redundant to a patently reactive variety of resistance, and perhaps self-negating between its intentionality and its delivery. Moreover, the problem of the manifesto and its success as an instrument of resistance is best signaled out by recourse to Nietzsche, as manifestos certainly conform to the problem wherein their value “can be neither demonstrated nor refuted from their results.”(Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001, p.19).
Perhaps one of the most problematic of Hoy’s inventions is his coining of a term, “post-critique” as a means of punctuating what comes after Poststructuralism, and since he assert the postructuralism label is in itself inadequate, post-critique is meant to function as its substitute as well. However, despite the acknowledged difficulty in the fixity of the arbitrary appellation that corrals differing theorists under one rubric as working “after structuralism”, Hoy’s explanation for this substitution does not seem to offer much in the way of a more suitable theoretical designator. The only conceivable advantage, beyond the novelty of the term, is that it is a slight bit more inclusive: it attracts within its allegedly flexible envelope social theorists that some may have disenfranchised from the more “canonical” guests at the poststructuralist party. However, those who seriously engage in the “poststructuralist” discourse--counting Hoy among this group--will no doubt have to contend with such figures as Butler and Žiżek; not as outside gate-crashers, but as serious participants and adjuncts to what can be properly called a discourse--since their respective projects coincide or engage the “contents” of the usual suspects. Too often are those who wield Žiżekian or Butlerian points of contention subjected to a kind of philotheoparoptessism by overzealous (reactive) practitioners of Poststructuralism.
It may just be this author’s selective understanding of critique that blinds to how Hoy intends to employ it, not to mention the always present trepidation in the applying of “post” to any term if it presupposes either logical succession or the final completion of the initial unprefixed term in premature closure. But, my understanding of critique has always been markedly Nietzschean and Deleuzian insofar as the notion of critique is inseparable from creation. As a bad capitalist joke, anything “post-critique” sounds too much like marketing or consumption. And, indeed, true critique engages its object in terms of value. If we read social ontology as precisely a kind of positive desire, we ascertain the true meaning of genealogy as that which “does not deny essence; it makes it depend, in each case, on an affinity of phenomena and forces, on a coordination of force and will.”(Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, NY: Columbia UP 1983, p. 77). Moreover, to speak of a kind of resistance (such as, say, a complete transvaluation of all know values, i.e., active nihilism) that is truly positive and in league with the will to power (which, in its positive aspect can have no objectives other than a kind of Spinozist striving to persist, to be), the kind of critique that resistance is imbricated with as an expression of its force will be, according to Nietzsche, innately a creation. Of course, Hoy intends “post-critique” as post-critical theory (though not exclusively as such), ironically juxtaposing against the fact that he considers this text a prequel to his last text, Critical Theory.
One of the recurring difficulties, as Hoy indicates, is how to give resistance a normative face. While remaining within the scope of how resistance is possible without lapsing into an erroneous instructional guide on doing resistance, it is always tempting to take one’s cues from a modified reading of Hans Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911); namely, that our social knowledge and intention lies on a bedrock of contrivance that can never be logically verified, but can be demonstrated to be justified pragmatically. Such a view, as we would find among sympathizers of the Colombian indigenous resistance groups--who have appealed to the country’s newly drafted Constitution in order to ground certain rights and freedoms--is a method fraught with flaring theoretical inconsistencies. Rather than openly espouse methods of resistance (which, to be Derridean, only gives credence to allow a process to be governed foundationally by what it hopes to achieve), Hoy suspends this in favour of reposing the very question of resistance as a systematic inquiry. Moreover, his deconstructive capacity allows him to consider “critique” in the pejoratively traditional sense in itself as unsatisfactory insofar as it would presuppose an “outside” to an “object” of study--in this case, resistance itself. Hoy’s pursuit of (re)posing the question of resistance, in addition to resisting some crude synthetic framework meant to cloister the very manifestations of resistance under a unitary definition, truly honours his pledge of grounding a “deconstructive genealogy” a la Derrida.
We must be grateful for Hoy’s contribution which , regardless of the vicious trench warfare among those of us parsing out matters in the poststructuralist domain, furnishes us with a finely crafted concentration of relevant and insightful examples that meticulously trace the high white notes and deeply embedded positions of exemplar theorists whose engagement with the issue of resistance has been a crucial feature in their respective projects, be it variants of the social, ethical, or political in scope. This focused and streamlined approach of arranging such disparate theorists according to a kind of shared conceptual “plane of consistency” without letting the tensions between their oeuvres create a rough kludge most definitively makes this text critically irresistible.
The central question of resistance, a question itself that functions as resistant to a hasty solution, is one that preoccupies both the thematic scaffolding and the particularities of Hoy’s ambitious undertaking. Critique distinguishes between two types of resistance: emancipatory, and oppressive or thaumaturgical. The derelict variety that wends its way through the contemporary discourse is precisely the facile assumption that resistance is ontologically viable in and of itself, and that the question of resistance need not be reposed; however, as has been the case among more conscientious theorists, the notion of resistance is not one we can afford to take for granted, and so the normative face emerges insofar as we ought to perform a deconstructive genealogy of the term itself to better ascertain the breadth, salience, and durability of the concept.
The reactive brand of resistance which presupposes the very structure to be resisted (thereby, through negation, legitimizing the existent authority of the oppressive) needs to be forgotten, in a sense. That is, to forget the dichotomous split between resistor and resisted, in a Nietzschean spirit of active forces going to the limit of what they can do irrespective of the constraining and curtailing reactive forces which seek to inhibit the burgeoning effect of critique-creation. Of course, without careful attention to the particularities of the consequences and origins of such a clarion call, we risk such a brazen statement of pluralism to become dogmatic. It is Hoy’s intention to give ample sensitivity to this very question: is resistance at all possible without sinking back into a reactive mode --or, genealogically speaking, being muddled by propped up origins and universals that can gain no purchase on the question of resistance itself? Moreover, we encounter the very difficulty of resistance in poststructuralist discourse, a discourse that has occasionally prided itself on having been able to resist dialectical monoliths and transcendent universals, in that such a discourse would be required to be honest about its own claims in being able to resist even its own methods. That is, to stay true to its heritage of privileging more affirmatively construed differences (in the case of Deleuze and Foucault) or to engage in a process of interminable negations that keep in play productive undecidabilities within regulated philosophemes and epistimemes (in the case of Derrida and “deconstruction” at large), the very discourse of resistance existent in these discourses would open passage to a “folding back”, a resistance to its own process of delineating the question of resistance, undermining this process by an infinite regress of questioning the question.
The lynchpin of poststructuralist social theory and its constructions of understanding resistance is, acknowledges Hoy, critique. Hoy demonstrates critique in practice through a gamut of notable discourse participants, appending his own “post-critique” at the close of each chapter as though modifying or embroidering upon a living discourse, posing critical reflections on the gains of each “micro-movement”. Although his coverage of Derrida is fairly extensive on the issue of resistance, his passages on Deleuze are occasionally a bit light, not to mention a few lacunas that would have bolstered a Deleuzian view of resistance such as Difference and Repetition (1968) wherein is found a much more sophisticated critique of Hegelianism and a maturation of Deleuze’s thought on Nietzsche (although the text’s project itself is never explicitly directed at Hegel for fear of confirming Hegel in opposing him). In addition, although Difference and Repetition lacks the overt polemical flair of Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), it is an exemplar text in demonstrating how Deleuze utilizes his three syntheses of time and grounds his transcendental empiricism as a means of illustrating the innate ontological character of resistance as it manifests itself as the play of forces. Moreover, it might have proved additionally useful if Hoy engaged Deleuze’s collaborations with Guattari, especially A Thousand Plateaus (1980) where the issue of resistance in terms of the nomad and the re/deterritorialization of space would have provided another articulation and hue to the discussion. As well, the sole-authored works by Guattari would have made an intriguing rejoinder on the issue of power/resistance and language, recalling Guattari’s view that State and language are inseparable insofar as it becomes an imbricated power play where the rules of the discourse are determined from the beginning, to which we are forced to respond in accordance to these rules (therefore raising the very ethic of discourse once again). However, these omissions, no doubt already considered by Hoy in the interests of brevity rather than a covert strategy, do not endanger the principle aim of the text; namely, to sleuth out those theorists in particular moments who engaged the issue of resistance either directly or obliquely. And, it is to Hoy’s credit that he constructs a tidy overview of an entire discourse, delaying only at the points of maximum salience on the issue of resistance.
The delicate balance of rejecting universal frameworks to describe resistance and a concern to ground some kind of theoretical critique that will be viable despite this resides in the heart of “post-critique”. A good example to demonstrate this tightrope walk is the issue of the manifesto. According to this problem, manifestos would themselves be impossible insofar as they would be trapped by the inherent problematic of “resistance” and that the socially prescriptive character of manifestos unilaterally refuse to purse the matter of their own written act of resistance to the origin of their value. A more recent example would be Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) that functions like a manifesto, yet artfully keeps itself critically distant from prescribing actions, and instead seemingly assigns the “hope” of the future to what they call “the multitude.” However, the text still operates as a manifesto, and so must also be subject to the criticisms that would follow such an enterprise. In seeking to explain the very phenomenon of the manifesto as a textual instrument meant to inspire “resisting attitudes” against some almost phantomized dominant Other (however determinate or amorphous the structure of this Other) would be to undermine the promised, positive benefit of the manifesto itself. This would make the case of the manifesto as an instrument of resistance redundant to a patently reactive variety of resistance, and perhaps self-negating between its intentionality and its delivery. Moreover, the problem of the manifesto and its success as an instrument of resistance is best signaled out by recourse to Nietzsche, as manifestos certainly conform to the problem wherein their value “can be neither demonstrated nor refuted from their results.”(Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001, p.19).
Perhaps one of the most problematic of Hoy’s inventions is his coining of a term, “post-critique” as a means of punctuating what comes after Poststructuralism, and since he assert the postructuralism label is in itself inadequate, post-critique is meant to function as its substitute as well. However, despite the acknowledged difficulty in the fixity of the arbitrary appellation that corrals differing theorists under one rubric as working “after structuralism”, Hoy’s explanation for this substitution does not seem to offer much in the way of a more suitable theoretical designator. The only conceivable advantage, beyond the novelty of the term, is that it is a slight bit more inclusive: it attracts within its allegedly flexible envelope social theorists that some may have disenfranchised from the more “canonical” guests at the poststructuralist party. However, those who seriously engage in the “poststructuralist” discourse--counting Hoy among this group--will no doubt have to contend with such figures as Butler and Žiżek; not as outside gate-crashers, but as serious participants and adjuncts to what can be properly called a discourse--since their respective projects coincide or engage the “contents” of the usual suspects. Too often are those who wield Žiżekian or Butlerian points of contention subjected to a kind of philotheoparoptessism by overzealous (reactive) practitioners of Poststructuralism.
It may just be this author’s selective understanding of critique that blinds to how Hoy intends to employ it, not to mention the always present trepidation in the applying of “post” to any term if it presupposes either logical succession or the final completion of the initial unprefixed term in premature closure. But, my understanding of critique has always been markedly Nietzschean and Deleuzian insofar as the notion of critique is inseparable from creation. As a bad capitalist joke, anything “post-critique” sounds too much like marketing or consumption. And, indeed, true critique engages its object in terms of value. If we read social ontology as precisely a kind of positive desire, we ascertain the true meaning of genealogy as that which “does not deny essence; it makes it depend, in each case, on an affinity of phenomena and forces, on a coordination of force and will.”(Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, NY: Columbia UP 1983, p. 77). Moreover, to speak of a kind of resistance (such as, say, a complete transvaluation of all know values, i.e., active nihilism) that is truly positive and in league with the will to power (which, in its positive aspect can have no objectives other than a kind of Spinozist striving to persist, to be), the kind of critique that resistance is imbricated with as an expression of its force will be, according to Nietzsche, innately a creation. Of course, Hoy intends “post-critique” as post-critical theory (though not exclusively as such), ironically juxtaposing against the fact that he considers this text a prequel to his last text, Critical Theory.
One of the recurring difficulties, as Hoy indicates, is how to give resistance a normative face. While remaining within the scope of how resistance is possible without lapsing into an erroneous instructional guide on doing resistance, it is always tempting to take one’s cues from a modified reading of Hans Vaihinger’s Die Philosophie des Als Ob (1911); namely, that our social knowledge and intention lies on a bedrock of contrivance that can never be logically verified, but can be demonstrated to be justified pragmatically. Such a view, as we would find among sympathizers of the Colombian indigenous resistance groups--who have appealed to the country’s newly drafted Constitution in order to ground certain rights and freedoms--is a method fraught with flaring theoretical inconsistencies. Rather than openly espouse methods of resistance (which, to be Derridean, only gives credence to allow a process to be governed foundationally by what it hopes to achieve), Hoy suspends this in favour of reposing the very question of resistance as a systematic inquiry. Moreover, his deconstructive capacity allows him to consider “critique” in the pejoratively traditional sense in itself as unsatisfactory insofar as it would presuppose an “outside” to an “object” of study--in this case, resistance itself. Hoy’s pursuit of (re)posing the question of resistance, in addition to resisting some crude synthetic framework meant to cloister the very manifestations of resistance under a unitary definition, truly honours his pledge of grounding a “deconstructive genealogy” a la Derrida.
We must be grateful for Hoy’s contribution which , regardless of the vicious trench warfare among those of us parsing out matters in the poststructuralist domain, furnishes us with a finely crafted concentration of relevant and insightful examples that meticulously trace the high white notes and deeply embedded positions of exemplar theorists whose engagement with the issue of resistance has been a crucial feature in their respective projects, be it variants of the social, ethical, or political in scope. This focused and streamlined approach of arranging such disparate theorists according to a kind of shared conceptual “plane of consistency” without letting the tensions between their oeuvres create a rough kludge most definitively makes this text critically irresistible.
February 11, 2010
selective in discussed topics but very provocative
July 31, 2011
I like this book a lot. Points "post-structuralism" in a progressive, applicable direction.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews