Kant after Duchamp by Thierry De Duve

De Duve, Thierry. Kant after Duchamp. An October Book. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1996. Pp. xv + 484.

It is well known that Marcel Duchamp’s long-delayed ascendancy to fame occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s, coincident with what Richard Rorty called the “linguistic turn” of academic discourse. Who better than Duchamp, a vilifier of what he called “retinal art,” to usher in this new era? Thirty-eight years after Lawrence Steefel wrote the first dissertation on Duchamp, publications on him are appearing today with a renewed vigor, justifying and corroborating his epitaph: “C’est toujours les autres qui meurent.” Ironically, this increased focus occurs at a time when the paradigm of academic discourse has itself shifted, as scholars increasingly turn to images as a way of reading culture. (See Scott Heller, “Visual Images Replace Text as Focal Point for Many Scholars,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 July 1996, A8-9, A15.) That Duchamp still continues to vex and trouble is clearly evidenced by this new wave of books on him.