The dissertation investigates the narratives of crisis and critique expressed at significant moments in the history of international relations theory in order to explain how recent debates on the end or crisis of international relations theory expose the paradoxical limits of critique in this field. The dissertation is structured by two organizing movements. The first movement, Chapters 2-4, examines the recent debates about a crisis of theorizing, placing them in their historical and conceptual context, and highlighting their axiological and political stakes. The second movement, Chapters 5-7, explores the contemporary theoretical status of claims to critique, the tendency for critical analysis to relapse into dogma, and the possibility of resisting the dogmatic potential of narratives of crisis in international relations. The overall analysis presents crisis and critique as two different possibilities of framing modern politics, predicated on diverging assumptions about (i) temporality, (ii) sovereignty, and (iii) knowledge. As a consequence, the dissertation argues that the points at which claims about crisis and international politics become most vulnerable to dogmatic tendencies occur in relation to the limits of the subject of knowledge and the sovereign politics of friends and enemies. A more effectively critical approach to politics in this context must work through a different framing in which the aesthetic subject may pursue claims to universality that rest on much stronger affirmations of difference and plurality and a much greater awareness of the limits of established and even progressive accounts of a sovereign subject of knowledge. Thus international relations theory must consider what it means to go beyond itself.