ABSTRACT: This article proposes a dialogue between Saidiya Hartman's and Michel Foucault's concept of critique, with the aim of contributing to a broader rethinking of critical practice and theory. While Hartman's work has become central to contemporary debates in Black Studies and beyond, its implications for the practice of critique—particularly in relation to Foucault—remain underexplored. I argue that Hartman's speculative reconstruction of lives obscured or erased by the colonial archive constitutes not a departure from critique, but a reconfiguration of it. I demonstrate that her practice of critical fabulation—what I term speculative critique—generates, like Foucault's critique, a counter-knowledge that is targeted against the dominant regime of truth. However, Hartman pushes further than Foucault by deliberately moving beyond the limits of the archive. This speculative dimension of critique illuminates the specific historical and political problem Hartman's critique is concerned with. At the same time, it invites a broader rethinking of critique. In the final part of the article, I will thus argue that Hartman's speculative critique unsettles the opposition of negative and affirmative critique by articulating a double movement of critique, in which negation cannot be discerned from the generative work of imagining the otherwise.