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Is critique a machine invented in the seventeenth century, an instrument among many others designed to destroy the remains of a feudalist and theological worldview? Is it a machine that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constantly adapted itself to new challenges, feeding itself on targets produced by the very modernity from which it issued? Is critique a machine that today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, has finally run out of steam, as Bruno Latour has recently suggested?¹ And if critique may seem to have come to a standstill, is this because it does not find new targets anymore or rather because it has torn to pieces the very possibility of distinguishing between a truth grasped by the critic, a set of norms to be criticised and masses in need of enlightenment? Has critique thereby devoured its very condition of possibility?

DOI: 10.1057/9780230357006_1

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