Critique as Coloniality: The Decolonial Challenge to Immanent Critique

ABSTRACT Frankfurt School methodology involves a lasting commitment to immanent critique. What distinguishes immanent critique from other forms of social criticism, scholars in this tradition argue, is that social practices are to be judged according to norms and potentials already contained within their objects. This article considers critical theory's relationship to coloniality by developing a three‐part challenge to the practice of immanent critique, drawing on insights of decolonial philosophers Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Maria Lugones, and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí. Immanent critics, I conclude, risk being inattentive to constitutive exclusions, reinscribing asymmetrical burdens on certain critics, and unwittingly replaying a mechanism of domination familiar from colonialism in and through their preferred method of critique. Accordingly, I argue that immanent critics should attend to relations of power that govern the practice of critique itself and offer reasons for being more pluralistic about our methods of criticism.