ABSTRACT
Ethical criticism does not escape such problems of mastery and validation - to do so would withdraw the title of 'history' from an account - instead such criticism distributes the basic roles in a different manner and with important results. This chapter describes how a particular negotiation of the historian's two bodies produced novel information when the concept of blind experience was privileged above that of understanding. It seems that the most important function of the discussion of the internal constitution of the tribunal is that it should be seen to be operational: the drama of criticism. The elaboration of the difference at the heart of the unity of Truth will take three stages: the differences instituted by death, by transmitting that Truth, and by receiving it. The critics and writers of historical accounts of eighteenth-century France seem to have found an unnamed emperor of the Tang dynasty a striking example of control over the transcendent forces of history.
