Kant after Duchamp brings together eight essays around a central thesis with many implications for the history of avant-gardes.

Marcel Duchamp, Thierry de Duve observes, 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.

The essays, all updated for this book, are divided into four parts. Part I revolves around Duchamp's famous/infamous Fountain. Part II explores Duchamp's passage from painting to the readymades, from art in particular to art in general. Part III looks at the aesthetic and ethical consequences of the replacement of "beauty" with "art" in Kant's Critique of Judgment.

Finally, part IV attempts to reconstruct an "archaeology" of modernism that paves the way for a renewed understanding of our postmodern condition.