Derridada: Duchamp as Readymade Deconstruction

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Jacques Derrida said that deconstruction "takes place everywhere." Derridada reexamines the work of artist Marcel Duchamp as one of these places. Tucker suggests that Duchamp belongs to deconstruction as much as deconstruction belongs to Duchamp. Both bear the infra-thin mark of the other. He explores these marks through the themes of time and diffrance, language and the readymade, and the construction of self-identity through art.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in Modernism and the avant-garde. It will be useful for undergraduate students of art history, modernism, and critical theory, as well as for graduate students of philosophy, visual culture studies, and art theory.

Reviews

This remarkable book is the first attempt to bring into dialogue two of the twentieth century's defining intellectual icons: the artist Marcel Duchamp and the philosopher Jacques Derrida. It not only shows how much these two very different thinkers had in common but manages to shed new light on their respective artistic and philosophical itineraries. In Derridada, Thomas Deane Tucker has constructed a wonderfully baroque textual machine that is worthy of Duchamp and Derrida themselves and he sends us back to their works with a fresh and engaged eye. -- Arthur Bradley, Professor of Comparative Literature, Lancaster University
Tuckers chiasmatic entwining of Derrida and Duchamp is a precise but accessible, cogent but playful double session: a marvelous and unique explication and demonstration of the principle strategies of two of the twentieth centurys most influential oeuvres. An antidote to the myriad arid applications of Derridas thought, this book is a pleasure to read both for its style and for its substance. -- Stuart Kendall, Eastern Kentucky University

Author Bio

Thomas Deane Tucker is a professor in the Department of English and Humanities at Chadron State College.