Critique. A Handbook is an endeavor to offer readers an at once comprehensive and rigorous synoptic view of the concept of critique. Better still, it runs the gamut of the many different and distinct ‘critiques’ that are nevertheless connected through complex, often non-linear and subterranean threads of family resemblances. The seventeen chapters of the Handbook constitute a work that should be taken neither as a simple mapping of different meanings of the term nor history of the concept, but rather a coordinate system that takes shape when we ask the question “What is critique?” Its synchronic axis consists of conceptual variations on the map of theoretical and research currents, while the diachronic axis shows the gradual evolutionary branching of concepts of critique from antiquity to today.