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Introduction When the Conditions of Intelligibility Become Visible What makes an object an object of knowledge? The question sounds abstract until we notice how often knowledge begins with something that appears to be already there. A sound is heard, a word is spoken, a text is read, a historical event is described, a group of things is classified. The object seems to precede the act of knowing it. Yet the history of modern thought repeatedly raises a more difficult possibility: perhaps what appears immediately as an object is already shaped by relations that are not themselves immediately visible. Ferdinand de Saussure gives this problem an unusually concise formulation: “Le point de vue crée l'objet” —“the point of view creates the object.” The statement does not mean that the scholar simply invents whatever object he wishes to study. It means that an object of scientific knowledge does not exist in isolation from the conceptual operation through which it is delimited. Wh...