What Immanent Critique is Not

Dr Alexei Procyshyn (Monash University)

Immanent critique is ubiquitous in continental philosophy. However, there is little common ground concerning how immanent critique operates, or what philosophical commitments it entails.  I aim to address these lacunae, arguing that the three desiderata of critical social theory commit theorists to ‘immanent critique.’ I then spell out some of immanent critique’s basic features by contrasting it with more recognizable argumentative or interpretative strategies. This yields three requirements: (i) an inherence requirement, which specifies the manner in which normative content is said to be internal to or implicit in a given practice, (ii) a contradiction requirement, which specifies how practice and commitment are supposed to fit such that failure of fit has motivational import, and (iii) an access requirement, which specifies how social critics can successfully identify the relevant normative content without simply imputing it.

Alexei Procyshyn is lecturer in contemporary European philosophy and critical theory at Monash University. He received his PhD from the New School for Social Research in 2013. Before coming to Monash, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Programme at the University of Macau. He is currently working on two projects, one a reconstruction of Walter Benjamin’s implicit philosophy of presentation and the other on the metaphysical and epistemological commitments of ‘immanent critique.’ He is interested in the parameters of failure and achievement for social action and Neo-Kantian approaches to meaning and value.