The word “critique" has a negative sense in everyday language. To criticize some thing, i.e., an idea, concept, or theory, is usually understood as revealing negative features of that thing. In this sense it can be thought of as a discursive attack of something. But it can also mean a lifting and separating of the thing in order to examine its properties, i.e., what belongs to it so that it is explicitly distinguished from things other than the thing in question. This critical examination is, insofar as it is an act of explicit distinction, a bringing to presence of the thing in contrast to the background of what is not the thing.
In the German languageAufheben normally has two main meanings which are in opposition. One is negative, "to abolish", "to annul", "to cancel" etc. The other is positive, "to supersede", "to transcend". Hegel exploited this duality of meaning and used the word to describe the positive-negative action whereby a higher form of thought or nature supersedes a lower form, while at the same time 'preserving' its 'moments of truth'. The proletariat's revolutionary negation of capitalism, communism, is an instance of this positive-negative movement of supersession, as is its theoretical realisation in Marx's method of critique.
External critique effects its interrogation by measuring a view's claims and/or categories against some pre-given conceptual yardstick, i.e., against some truth-criterion presupposed as valid in advance. Though of a monological character we are reminded of Einstein's injunction that “no problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” By contrast an immanent critique operates by interrogating or challenging a view from within. It is dialogical insofar as it does not impose its own truth-criteria on the view criticized; rather, it places its own truth criteria at issue within the critical engagement and develops itself (instead of merely confirming its own validity) in and through the process of critique it undertakes. The relevance of immanent critique is that it does not presuppose the validity of any metatheory, but in the critical process, places at issue the categories in terms of which it initiates the critical play.
It is necessary to appreciate that we begin critique not in isolation, but in the tradition the thing, i.e., an idea, concept, or theory, in which we are inevitably situated. Traditions are not closed or self-contained; instead, they are open to interpretation from other traditions. Consequently, while we develop new ways for conducting and describing interventions, we do not suddenly abandon our past. We continue to engage its concepts. We establish the significance of new work in terms of what others have already said and done. This situation implies that it is misleading to claim that we can justify our point of departure absolutely.
Let us also understand critique, as that cognitive, and eventually practical effort which is not satisfied to merely accept the prevailing ideas, actions, and social conditions unthinkingly and from mere habit; effort which aims to coordinate the individual sides of social life with each other and with the general ideas and aims of the epoch; to deduce them genetically; to distinguish the appearance from the essence; to examine the foundations of things; in short, to really know them. Ideas are not sacred things to be exempted from critical inquiry.
In poststructuralism, a critic's job is not to resolve or mediate contradictions, but to dramatize them--which, in practice, often means enlarging, even exaggerating them. However, critique as a mode of intellectual criticism should be more than a promise of critique. We must turn our attention from idealistic to the specific concrete analysis of phenomena, i.e., globalization. Mere intellectual criticism does not automatically lead to changes in the material conditions of humankind.