Practices, Conventions, Problems

This paper aims at examining the way in which Rahel Jaeggi’s conception of forms of life as inert bundles of practices is connected to the problem of the possibility of an immanent critique of life forms, that is, of a kind of analysis that is both internal and transformative. In the first part, my contention will be that understanding practices in terms of conventions makes it difficult to admit of internal criticisms of them. Jaeggi’s account of immanent critique, as argued in the second part, tries to differentiate practices from social conventions by maintaining that transformations of life forms can be seen as the result of episodes of crises ignited by the inability to cope with ‘second order’ problems. I maintain that, unless one is willing to postulate something like an absolute telos dictating the historical sequence that forms of life must follow, the way in which forms of life solve second order problems displays some conventional features preventing any quick assimilation to the paradigm of immanent critique. This circumstance, as argued in the third section of my presentation, poses an obstacle to Jaeggi’s project of an immanent critique of life forms.