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Kant After Duchamp. By Thierry de Duve.
Published by The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1996, 484 pp. 13 illustrations. $39.95 hardcover

Clement Greenberg Between the Lines: Including a Previously Unpublished Debate with Clement Greenberg. By Thierry de Duve, tr. by Brian Holmes.
Published by Éditions Dis Voir, Paris, 1996, 158 pp. $32.95 paper.

Du Nom au Nous. By Thierry de Duve.
Published by Éditions Dis Voir, Paris, 1995, 124 pp. 120 F. paper.

La Déposition: À propos de Déçue la mariée se rhabilla de Sylvie Blocher. By Thierry de Duve.
Published by Éditions Dis Voir, Paris, and F.R.A.C. Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Marseille, 1995, 60 pp. 19 illustrations. 120 F. paper.

Jeff Wall. By Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc, and Boris Groys.
Published by Phaidon Press, London, 1996, 160 pp. TK illustrations. price TK.


Kant After Duchamp will be seen as the most important and lasting recent book on art, but it’s going to take a while to sink in. I’m tempted to say that, just as Marcel Duchamp referred to his Mariée mis à nu par ses célibataires, même, as a “delay in glass,” Kant After Duchamp might be called a delay in words. Not just that it’s dense, which it is, but that it’s cagey. Every sentence, it seems, makes a claim, which means that every one demands thought, argument, criticism. All that tends to stop you in your tracks, makes you want to pour over it: has de Duve really gotten this just right or not? But the reason answering that question matters so much is that each sentence is not just significant in itself, but is also going to count for something at various other points in the book, perhaps widely scattered. So that same writing that keeps stopping you in your tracks also keeps sending you backward and forward to other passages elsewhere in the book, and the supposed linearity of reading, and of writing, is thereby completely short-circuited.
When de Duve’s book Résonances du readymade: Duchamp entre avant-garde et tradition was published in 1989, its back cover announced the imminent publication that same year of another book, Kant After Duchamp, which in the event did not appear. Also in 1989, de Duve published Au Nom de l’art: Pour une archéologie de la modernité, whose three chapters (one of them titled “Kant [d’]apres Duchamp”) were described by their author as “complementary pieces” to the same “puzzle” as the four of Résonances. Interleaved, with some revision, and with the addition of an eighth essay, those seven chapters (composed, according to the dates appended to them, between 1978 and 1989), form the present Kant After Duchamp, some of whose chapters were composed in English, others in French. Whether the volume that has finally appeared under that title seven years later is or can be the same book is a nice question, but when dealing with a self-proclaimed nominalist like de Duve, the presupposition ought to be that the same title names the same book.
Who knows what accounted for the delay that brings this (presumably definitive) version seven years behind schedule; certainly the preparation of a long book puts a writer to a severe test, and his publisher as well. Reading one can also be a trial for readers, and the most consequential books often do not achieve their resonance until well after their publication, because it takes so long to assimilate them. I suspect that Kant after Duchamp is one of those books whose importance will grow with time, but in any case it is difficult to assimilate, and my remarks on it here are meant to be provisional at best. In short, this is one of those books you don’t read, but only re-read, and apparently it has also been the sort of book you can’t write, but only re-write.
The book consists of eight more or less self-contained chapters—at least it was possible to read the chapter on “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint” and “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas” as self-contained essays when they were first published in, respectively, Artforum and Reconstructing Modernism (ed. by Serge Guilbaut, MIT Press)—yet these separate chapters are woven of many of the same fine threads, though they shuttle back and forth among disparate levels of analysis, between “the universal and the singular,” between “the specific and the generic,” between “anything and everything,” between “ after and before,” to quote the titles of the four overarching sections among which the eight chapters are paired.
De Duve’s project, to the extent it can be summarized, would be to understand the relation between the readymade and painting, the avant-garde and the tradition—or, as it is personified here, between Marcel Duchamp and Clement Greenberg. It has to do with reconciling one’s love of painting with the feeling that Duchamp’s Fountain—the notorious upturned urinal signed “R. Mutt”—is central to artistic modernity. One might call it an impossible project, except that I believe de Duve is correct in finding it to be an essential project for the understanding of art in the twentieth century (which does not necessarily make it any the less impossible). The swarming Duchampians may be no more satisfied with the result than the sparse Greenbergians, but those who prefer the cortex and the retina a little more tightly wired—and who would wish to mend the diremption between aesthetic experience and artistic form which de Duve acutely diagnoses—will not fail to find encouragement here.
That the book is all of a piece, with subtle interconnections belying the apparent diversity of its parts, does not mean it is all equally convincing. (That’s the problem with projects grand enough to be impossible.) The opener, “Art Was a Proper Name” (representing the universal as opposed to the singular) is an immensely lucid dialectical tour of ways that the question of art might be, and has been, approached. I call it dialectical because, while de Duve seems to want to be seen as a Foucauldian archeology, it much more closely resembles a Hegelian phenomenology. (Not only is de Duve more Hegelian than Foucauldian, despite his dedication of his book to the memory of Michel Foucault; it is also more Hegelian than Kantian, despite Kant’s nomination in its title.) In any case it is a bravura demonstration of the way ideas, reaching their limits or exposing their limitations, reveal their substance only as they morph into other quite different ideas. But de Duve reveals his own limitations here, for his notion of art as a proper name—“just as with Peter, Paul, or Harry, or Catherine, Fanny, or Valerie”—completely falls apart when he tries to make this something more than an image or metaphor and calls upon Saul Kripke’s theory of proper names in Naming and Necessity (Harvard University Press, 1972) to undergird his account, thereby claiming to “take the chance that if some day the theory you accept it shown to be false,