Customer Reviews

Kant after Duchamp (October Books)

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If you have a background in French critical theory, arising from the 1970's, this book will be a totally fascinating one. If not...you may be baffled, find the book not what you expected, and get angry that you've spent this much money on a work you can't understand. Be forewarned. That having been said, Thierry de Duve is one of the most outstanding contemporary art theoriticians writing today. His slant on Duchamp and Duchamp's impact on subsequent modern/contemporary art is without parallel.

A difficult question posed and a difficult answer given. In struggling with two of the most influential personnas in our culture, De Duve does himself, and aesthetics good. Long and convoluted (to the extreme of working out a symbolic logic of Duchamp?) this is nonetheless a great book

What's missing in this marvelous book is a discussion of Kant's Lutheran religious aspect. Most philosophers treat him as a secular philosopher, but he wasn't. The assault on Christianity by the entire left has seemingly eclipsed the fact that all of the great 19th century thinkers were Lutherans: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, of course, but also Nietzsche (who was raised as a Lutheran and whose seventeen prior generations of father, grandfather, etc., had been Lutheran pastors), Marx raised in a Lutheran household, and so on.

What Duchamp does is knock out the otherworldly purposiveness that Kant claimed for art. Thierry de Duve aborts the seriousness of his discussion by neglecting the theological dimension of Kant's inquiry.

However, this is still a great book albeit a limited one, as he could have gone further to the heart of the culture wars by contrasting the Sadean nature of the surrealist enterprise with the Christian nature of the Kantian.