EXCERPT What does it mean to understand a contemporary object? It means to make a wager that cannot be entirely justified by the history of epistemology. But a wager that, nonetheless, is not merely arbitrary, that is not simply a conjecture or a figment of the imagination. Such a wager becomes necessary once we perceive that we are unable to understand certain contemporary objects without excluding something from them, without somehow mutilating, in multiple senses, the object that we wished to understand…