For decades the Critique of Judgment received little attention outside of the narrow circle of Kant scholarship. What little notice it did receive in broader circles was usually confined to an obligatory bow to it as the philosophical source of the critical doctrines of aesthetic formalism and of the autonomy of art: the ideas, that is, that in all works of art our interest is properly confined to features of perceptual form and that appreciation and judgment of art must take place within parameters set by art itself, independently of any other or broader cognitive or practical concerns. In the last decade or two, however, Kant's third Critique has suddenly been transformed from a tabula rasa into a palimpsest of philosophical and critical theories. Instead of being the archetypical work of modernism, the Critique of Judgment has suddenly become the archetypical work of postmodernism, revealing the contradictions inherent in every idea of knowledge, rationality, culture, and art which it has suddenly become so fashionable to discover. No longer the paradigm of an irenic classicism or a more contemporary but equally imperturbable formalism, the last of Kant's trio of great Critiques has suddenly become the symbol of deconstructionism itself, a book that shows how every attempt to make firm distinctions between accident and essence, whether in theory or practice (and including the distinction between theory and practice), undercuts itself.