Almost two centuries have passed since the young Karl Marx proclaimed the completion of
the critique of religion, adding that such criticism was in fact the “prerequisite of all
criticism”. One could say that critique‟s future, unlike that of religion, seemed particularly
bright in 1844. From our present point of view, it is difficult not to be struck by two
contemporary phenomena that seem to turn this dictum upside down, namely “the return
of the religious” and the “crisis of critique”. Drawing on various discrepant accounts of and
conflicting attempts to solve the latter, we note that they are nonetheless informed by a
common set of historical accounts of critique. Have these accounts contributed to critique‟s
current conundrum and, if so, in what way? Given its privileged position, we have turned to
Michel Foucault‟s genealogy of critique in order to tackle this question. After examining its
main theses, we observe that despite it‟s astonishing insights concerning the religious
origins of critique it fails to draw the necessary consequences of this fact for contemporary
critical practices, a failure which not only immobilizes the latter but also puts into question
the viability of genealogy itself. We conclude by proposing that critique seems destined to
remain a formal enterprise so long as it continues to oppose itself to religion instead of
specifying and fully assuming its own fundamental religiosity.
