Thierry de Duve is Director of Studies, Association de préfiguration de l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

"Thierry de Duve has sought, in this remarkable text, to'understand why Marcel Duchamp was such a great artist.' A taskthat calls upon resources beyond those of art history, art criticism,and aesthetic analysis, of all which the author is master... Thetone is wry, urbane, informed, and urgent; and it is a tribute to hisappreciation of the depth of his subject that he takes us further inour understanding than we have ever seen before, but leaves us withthe sense that more remains to be said than anyone before hadimagined." Arthur C. Danto , Johnsonian Professor Emeritus ofPhilosophy, Columbia University; and art critic, The Nation "You don't have to agree with all of Thierry de Duve's premises and arguments (needless to say I don't) in order to recognize that he has written a remarkable book. The essays gathered in Kant After Duchamp mount the most formidable case yet made for Duchamp's importance, and what makes de Duve's achievement all the more unexpected is that this is done by way of an intense engagement with the writings of Duchamp's seeming opposite, the critic Clement Greenberg. A third constant presence in these pages is Kant's Critique of Judgement, which at once governs de Duve's understanding of Greenberg's "formalism" and is itself brilliantly reinterpreted in the light of Duchamp's readymades. De Duve has always been an independent thinker. Now he has produced an indispensable book, a brilliant and learned "archaeology" of Duchampian modernism that is also a highly original contribution to philosophical aesthetics." Michael Fried, Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities, The Johns Hopkins University

Kant after Duchamp brings together eight essays around a central thesis with many implications for the history of avant-gardes. Although Duchamp's ready mades broke with all previously known styles, de Duve observes that he made the logic of modernist art practice the subject matter of his work, a shift in aesthetic judgment that replaced the classical "this is beautiful" with "this is art." De Duve employs this shift (replacing the word "beauty" by the word "art") in a rereading of Kant's Critique of Judgment that reveals the hidden links between the radical experiments of Duchamp and the Dadaists and mainstream pictorial modernism.