Immanent Critique
From a practical point of view, immanent critique is the evaluation of our selves at the level described by the faculties. It is the evaluation of our “subjective presuppositions,” the goal of which is moving “beyond” them. Yet, because the presuppositions that limit our experiences and judgments are constitutive of all our experience, such a “beyond” slips through our fingers the harder we try to grasp it. This is why Deleuze emphasises the centrality of the experience of the violence of encounters that rupture ordinary experience. Encounters allow us to glimpse the limits of thought and routes towards its tangible transgression. And while immanent critique cannot generate the experience of encounter, its lived practice cultivates habits of sensitivity and openness to encounters, operating as a form of anti-fascism within the self. Such sensitivity allows for the production of problematic ideas as vehicles for the reinvestment of critical practice into the selves’ passive flows. Deleuze’s use of Kantian critique to articulate a theory of faculties thus simultaneously provides the foundation for an ontology and points to a new model for a way of living.