This article makes a case for the capacity of "social practice" accounts of agency and freedom to criticize, resist, and transform systemic forms of power and domination from within the context of religious and political practices and institutions. I first examine criticisms that Michel Foucault's analysis of systemic power results in normative aimlessness, and then I contrast that account with the description of agency and innovative practice that pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom identifies as "expressive freedom." I argue that Brandom can provide a normative trajectory for Foucault's diagnoses of power and domination, helping to resolve its apparent lack of ethical direction. I demonstrate that Foucault, in turn, presents Brandom with insights that might overcome the charges of abstraction and conservatism that his pragmatic inferentialism frequently encounters. The result is a vindication of social practice as an analytical lens for social criticism that is at once both immanent and radical.KEY WORDS: Foucault, Brandom, Audre Lorde, social practice, pragmatism, democracy, expressive freedom, immanent criticism THE YEAR WAS 1979. The event was a New York University panel discussion addressing feminist perspectives on "The Personal and the Political." Identifying herself as a black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet, and warrior, Audre Lorde rose to the podium and delivered a searing indictment of what she characterized as an all-too-easy, white, North American, academic feminism for its inattention to systemic forms of subjugation extending beyond the margins of the Academy. She said, Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference-those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older-know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in JRE 37.3:419-448.