Kant was originally an installation featuring a five-and-a-half-minute video and ten tableaux; this entry focuses on the video. In it, Éric Duyckaerts stages himself as an angry rapper who hurls French and English insults at the great German philosopher—crude and utterly devoid of any philosophical relevance. The video mimics a low-budget music video, featuring direct-to-camera shots. The artist lacks the physical presence, gestures, or clothing style typical of rappers, and the setting is a random, irrelevant space—likely an art school. The tableaux are horizontally divided, superimposing film stills from the video with German words.

Completely irreverent and barely musical, this “music video” is nonetheless connected to other works by Éric Duyckaerts, such as the book Hegel ou La vie en rose [Hegel or La vie en rose] [1], in which Kant makes a brief appearance, and the video Abécédaire [ABC Book] [2], a hilarious, ultra-condensed, indirect tribute to Gilles Deleuze.

Behind the apparent mockery of philosophy in some of his remarks, Duyckaerts clearly knew what he was talking about. His academic background—and above all, the breadth of his culture and curiosity—were no joke. One could even say that insulting Immanuel Kant with the vocabulary of rap blurs categories and, by extension, draws attention to a key concept in the philosopher’s thought—the faculty of categorization—without reproducing his work or relying on any form of authority.

Marie Muracciole, November 2020

Translated by Laurie Hurwitz

[1] Éric Duyckaerts, Hegel ou La vie en rose (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, collection L’arpenteur, 1992).

[2] Éric Duyckaerts, Abécédaire, 2011, video, color, sound, 2:34.