Judges notes from the 2021 Kuracca Prize for Australian Literature.

I don’t know. Perhaps critique — let alone ‘radical critique’ — is today finished as a viable modality of action, whether private or public, moral or political. The word critique enters English from the French in the late 16th century, although its fortunes really take off in the eighteenth century, where it is bound to the upsurge of quote-unquote ‘Enlightenment,’ with all of the ambiguities accompanying that complex phenomenon and its crises, critics, criticisms, criticising and criteria.

Now that the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program (DIP) has been released – not the full 6700-page document, mind you, but its 528-page executive summary – there is what the committee’s chairman Dianne Feinstein calls ‘comprehensive and excruciating detail’ available for public scrutiny.