Thanatology of critics. The journals in the age of evaluation. This article deals with the issue of the transformation of the role of the journals induced by the new mechanisms of evaluation of research, focusing on the humanities journals as a specific form of critical culture. The thesis is that the standardization processes in progress – a policy of digitalisation which is primarily a digitization of politics – lead to the extinction of the journal as a place for the discussion of the “Fragwürdige” and to the extinction of the essay as form.