EXCERPT It is possible to maintain a distinction between the ‘order of ideas’ and the ‘order of history’, whilst admitting that one unfolds according to the contingencies of the other. The objects or situations that occasion or facilitate a certain meditation at a given historical conjuncture operate a selective pressure on thought: Certain turns in thinking can only take place in the company of certain objects, which thereby become instruments of philosophy, and the worldly indices of transformations in the conception of reason itself, the ‘image of thought’…