Matisse and Duchamp seem to incarnate ideal poles of the tension internal to modern art as it plunged into crisis the —a polemical operation that opened the way to contemporary art's . Where Matisse subverted the aesthetic regime by bringing painting out of itself to invest its environment in a Bergsonian energetics of color, Duchamp cuts it off from the plastic arts through a reversal of Bergson's . The captures a literalized signifier of this perspective. is an extraordinarily rich philosophical study that offers a startling new account of the dis/continuity between the problems of contemporary art and the new articulations Duchamp fabricated between image and idea, science and art, painting and language. Alliez and Bonne's meticulous archaeological survey rediscovers the real problems and motivations of “Duchamp-thought” through a close analysis of his entire oeuvre: from the Nudes in which the problem of representing movement is gradually displaced into the realm of the virtual, the image disqualified in favor of the diagram, to the pataphysical sciences of chance and the particular, the readymades, the Large Glass and —and beyond, as the artist carbonizes the gallery with and ties it up with , in installations that take Duchamp beyond Duchamp.