In Malaise dans l'esthétique, Rancière argues that politics and aesthetics are currently undergoing an "ethical turn". According to the philosopher, art today no longer fulfils its critical function. In a number of contemporary investigative narratives, the suspension of the critical and political dimension of discourse to the detriment of ethical consensus goes hand in hand with a bracketing of the deontological and methodological constraints that frame scientific field practices, and from which writers can more easily abstract themselves. This phenomenon invites us to question the motif of "dialogue" between the arts and the social sciences, which tends to erase its conflictual dimension, and to ask what documentary writing can contribute to a critique of the fabrication of knowledge.