Abstract
Critical reception of Marcel Duchamp since the 1970s has tended to elevate him into the very figure of the Artist he sought to attack. One aspect of this domestication has involved neglecting Duchamp’s fin de siècle ‘eroticism’ with its sexual innuendos and double-entendres. Yet this very readymade vulgarity allows us to recover a Duchamp still capable of disrupting the genres of Art and the gendered Artist, by revealing a theory embedded in his work which continually reverses and displaces phallocentrism in a game consisting of the confusion of genders and genres. We argue that Duchamp’s disruption of the discursive typologies of the genre of art can be profitably read through this apparently trivial sexualized wordplay, particularly in the transgender passage into Rrose Sélavy. Reading this aspect of Duchamp after, i.e. within and against, Lacan demonstrates how Duchamp’s singular regime of signs governed by equivocity and indetermination subverts the ‘phallic function’ of the signifier.
Still, in your work this eroticism has remained disguised [travesti] for rather a long time. Always disguised, more or less – but not out of prudishness? – (Marcel Duchamp, to Pierre Cabanne)
Jacques Lacan, they don’t even know what that is – Jules Lacue would do just as well – It’s the English pronunciation of what we call, in our language, la queue [the dick]. (Jacques Lacan, ‘Joyce the Symptom’)
[…] the spoonerism returning to the lips, the inversion to the ear. (Jacques Lacan, ‘Lituraterre’)
Introduction
In an important issue dated Fall 1979, the editors of October sought to mount a defence of the foregoing decade of artistic disruption which had challenged and compromised ‘the very notion of Art itself’ – a defence against attempts ‘to reerect the toppled statue of the Artist’ (Krauss and Michelson, 1979: 3). Forty years on, after a period that has seen a continuing lionization of the Duchamp posthumously crowned in 1977,
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we cannot help but ask whether Duchamp has come to occupy precisely the pedestal of the statue he was supposed to have ‘toppled’. In spite of his own intentions, John Cage indicated one way of ensuring this reerection, by remaining silent on the aspect of Duchamp that is most troublesome from this point of view: his fondness for a fin de siècle ‘eroticism’ which, with its sexual innuendos and double-entendres, plunges us into a spiral of bad taste (‘ As the contemporary arts can no longer be organized and identified by Aristotelian categories, so the interpretations brought to bear on them can no longer be distributed among the various types of discourse which have been used to speak in the past.
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The Hinge of the Large Glass and Étant Donnés
It is from the indetermination in the ‘back and forth’, governed by afterwardsness, that we must start once again; from the indetermination practised by Duchamp as a method of analysis and self-analysis; from that first indetermination of the Nude, plastically and verbally brought down, descended from its organic academic status as a means to take on, to attack, all genres/genders (that of painting, especially the cubo-futurism of the time, and that of the nude, masculine or feminine … but is it really a nude?) Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), or the Fall of Genre/Gender in painting – which merited its interdiction (prohibited from being shown, its exhibitionism curtailed), 4 and would not exactly facilitate The Passage from Virgin to Bride (1912). This Passage was already marked by a ‘pas’, a negation, a non-passage that would continue to resonate in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923) – stripped bare [mise à nu] perhaps, but never actually laid [mise]. Proof of this, via the écorché-machine Bride (1912), might take the form of a Klein bottle – which, as everyone knows, is unrepresentable (in three dimensions) unless drawn through itself in a conjuring trick which makes it ‘appear’ that its pipework is nothing other than the cut through which it disappears from its surface as it fills it. Continuously traversing its two discontinuous faces, the ‘divine bottle’ is filled only with itself. And if it is true, as Lacan says, that ‘not just anyone can do this, drawing your lining [doublure] out through your neck. For this is how the support of the being of the subject is constructed’ (Lacan, 2001a: 202), Duchamp seems to make it a medium for the extimacy of painting confronted from within, in its visceral pictorial intimacy, by its outside, by its mechanical other of which it is full and to which it marries, affirming a kind of superior hermaphroditism: ‘Beauty of precision in the service of indetermination: contradictory machines,’ as Octavio Paz (2011: 18) puts it.
Contradictory machines perhaps, but above all a machination in the form of a ‘hinge’ and ‘mirroring’ of the sequence that will unfold between The Bride of the Large Glass and the posthumous Étant donnés (1946–66), with an upending of the formula of the ‘abstract’ stripping bare and the bending over of its ‘transparent’ glass formula, in one last admonition to the viewer-voyeur whose male gaze is blinded and, in one more twist, returned. Étant donnés is the tableau vivant of a still life (nature morte) in the form of a false-cunted mannequin (mannequin au faux con) as readymade as it is androgyne, access to which is at once ordered and prohibited, inter-dicted, by an Objet-Dard (1951/62), an ‘‘ard object’, an ‘object-dart’ feigning the phallic, with its curious curve that turns the feminine sex inside out like the finger of a phallic glove (Female Fig Leaf, 1950/51). A final proof, which includes both the ‘divine bottle’ (Rabelais via Lacan) and the joke that comes out of its neck. For, produced ‘by the inflation of this ab-sex sense’ – to bring in as soon as possible another Lacan, he of L’Étourdit (‘à la gonfle de ce sens ab-sexe’) (Lacan, 2001b: 452; 2009: 38) – where what inflates is the signifier, engorged by its readymade reservoir, the ‘permeability of genres/genders’ that is literalized, photo-graphed as Rrose Sélavy (1921), had for some time already been deployed/installed at 11 rue Larrey in Duchamp’s modest (‘miniscule’, he said) apartment-studio. A topological counter-proof against the idea that a door must be either open or closed (didn’t Felix Klein himself describe topology as the science of qualitative transformations?), Door, 11, rue Larrey (1927), according to Duchamp’s own explanation, involves ‘a single door which would close alternatively on two jamb-linings placed at right angles’ (Schwarz, 1970: 497). Since the door can be open without being closed, but never closed without being open as well, the hinge collapses around its pivot, which will soon be interrogated via an ‘ironic causality’ (Duchamp, 1973: 30) that hinges on the homonymy and homophony of the signifier unleashed by Duchamp’s ‘falconry (fauconnière)’. He gave us a first glimpse of this with the collection of bad puns that presents Precision Oculism’s ‘
From the Principle of Non-Contradiction to the Phallic Signifier (and Its Deviation)
The prologue of the play in three acts represented here could, with the Lacan of ‘L’Étourdit’, be called ‘oracular’, but for the very opposite reason to his (analytic) speech: the last thing we want to attempt here is yet another psychoanalytic reading of Duchamp and of the field of art [du champ de l’art] which he warpspeaks [ourdit] all the better to stun it [étourdire], 8 ‘given what we know of the connections to be made between the oral and the voice, of sexual displacement’. 9 Which, let us agree, is the least we can do to signal [faire signe de] a ‘precision oculist’ (the title that Duchamp swiftly, at the beginning of the 1920s, gave on his business card) who defines the ‘art coefficient’ as ‘an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed’ (Duchamp, 1973: 139). It will therefore be a matter, if you like – and the bon mot is once again Lacan’s – of a ‘pass [passe]’, a trick (turned by Rrose Sélavy?), a kind of ‘conjuring trick [tour de passe-passe]’ (Sélavy Duchamp?) that consists in representing Duchamp in Lacan as that absent one who, ‘like-no-other [comme-pas-un]’, will have had a far livelier and swifter idea (the idea of a swift nude?): 10 that the principle of all principles, the principle that cannot be proved but to which one can only appeal, by deploying not the sequence of contradictions to which its negation would lead (as per Aristotle), but the play of differences ‘analogous to the combinations of a game that has no rules’ (Duchamp, 1999: 112 n185), 11 well, ‘there it is: there is no sexual relationship’ (Lacan). Something of which, according to the psychoanalyst’s discourse, Aristotle ‘naturally’ had no idea, being on this point ‘totally idiotic [vachement con]’ 12 since he knew nothing of ‘the potential sexual implications of the recourse to the principle of contradiction’ (Lacan, 2006a: 223, translation modified). But it will be Duchamp who is the least Aristotelian of the two, since he takes as his mistress ‘the presence of difference as such and nothing else’, even in the very place where Lacan characterizes the signifier as ‘being that which all others are not’ (Lacan, 2011: 36). For if this is the case, the exception proves the rule: the rule of the Aristotelian game (no universal without an exception that founds it, the exception reduces the universal to … the same [même]) and the rule of the ‘phallic function’ erected into a new Organon of the Impossible which, to make up for the absence of sexual relation that it supports with its lack, ‘is ceaselessly not written [ne cesse pas de ne pas s’écrire]’ in a play of knowledge ‘that can only be articulated thanks to the entire edifice of analytic discourse’ (Lacan, 2000: 94, 34–5, trans. modified). Need we restate that there is no more of the symbolic in Duchamp than there is of the iconic? And that, if Duchamp’s art falls into the trans modelling and semio-erotics of Rrose Sélavy, it is because one can only speak of it as ‘indexical’ to the extent that all indices are not so much ‘deceptive’ as faulty, engaged with a Real that expects everything of ‘speech’, that ‘noise in which one can hear anything and everything, ready to submerge with its roar what the “reality principle” constructs there that goes by the name of the “outside world”’ (Lacan, 2006a: 324). 13 The Duchamp-formula, the formula of the field [du champ] thus trans-formed from the ‘impossible’ into the molecular revolution of infra-thin possibilities? ‘The deviation [écart] is an operation’ (Duchamp, 1973: 26, trans. modified). An operation in the form of a deviation in which the password of a Duchampian reading of Lacan might even crop up, as a rewriting of the one of which the other will have been the symptom, without that making it a synthome. Duchamp is not Joyce. And especially not Lacan’s Joyce.
The Sex-Ratio of Wordplay
If, as Breton asserts, ‘Marcel Duchamp arrives more quickly than anyone else at the critical point of ideas’ (Breton, 1922, cited in Badiou, 2008), it is because, to speak like Badiou after Lacan, he never compromises the indetermination with which he short-circuits everything that might be heard as ‘genre/gender’ in art. Something that can be verified in the shortest of circuits – Duchamp’s – between the 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14) and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, where he gives himself up to nothing less than a stunning [étourdissante] heterogenesis of himself in the field of the sign/of sex [Duchamp du signe/du sexe]. Duchamp du signe as swansong [chant du cygne] of sex? In any case, what we witness here is the swiftest of passages from the principle of contradiction – which he takes to the letter of its abbreviated diction (isn’t it strangely resonant with the Freudian affirmation that the unconscious knows no negation?) so as to raise indetermination into the principle of a ‘cointelligence of contraries’ (Duchamp, 1999: 112) developed in ‘infra-thin’ differences which are a ‘cut’, ‘cuttage’, or ‘cuttation’ 14 from the logical field of non-contradiction – to the principle that there is no sexual relation. All of this somewhat as if the even [même] of The Bride, that play of retroactive ab-negation in which the end of her ‘title’ strips her of the title of bride, was lifted from the inaugural enunciation of the principle of non-contradiction: ‘[T]he same [même] thing cannot at the same time belong and also not belong to the same thing and in the same respect’ (Aristotle, 2016: 52–3, emphasis added). ‘[S]uch a starting point’ would then be ‘the most stable of all’ (Aristotle, 2016: 53). On the basis of the univocity of sense which structures the world like a determinate and determining language, it holds that it is impossible for the same [même] word to both have and not have the same [même] sense: ‘The starting-point is […] to signify something […] [Then] demonstration will be possible, since there will already be something definite […] For not to signify one thing is to signify nothing, and if names do not signify, discussion with others is done away with, as in truth it is even with ourselves’ (Aristotle, 2016: 53–4). Should we ask here, with Duchamp: even [même]? Or, with Lacan: Tru-lie [vrai-ment]?
Isn’t Duchamp’s ‘eroticism’, onanistic and (precision) oculistic, here knotted very precisely with its cortege of trivially phallic wordplay? Although for a moment there may be an illusion of barracks humour (just long enough to slip it in swiftly, cal-cul-atedly arse over tête, in Rrose Sélavy’s letterhead), would these puns he ‘auscultates’ so coldly into Morceaux moisis reduced to the bones of counternatural verbal coitus be so perfect in their aesthetic sterility if the spoonerisms (or spoonerism itself, that is to say phonetic equivocation) had no object other than to ‘bugger’ the principle
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of a ‘same [même]’ of identification that it counterfeits via antistrophe? Michel Sanouillet, the editor of Duchamp du signe, recalls the importance for Duchamp of the elementary postulate (‘the great law or the key to speech’) enunciated by Jean-Pierre Brisset, and upon whose basis his Logical Grammar grew into a phonetic scenography indefinitely accelerated by predominantly paronymic and paranomastic linguistic procedures: There exist in speech numerous laws heretofore unknown, the most important of which is that a sound or a series of identical sounds, intelligible and clear, can express different things via a modification in the way in which those names or words are written or understood. All ideas enunciated with similar sounds have the same origin and are related, in their principle, to the same object. (cited in Duchamp, 1994: 146–7, emphasis added)
The operation of ‘placing into relation’ relies on the replacement of the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction (where the ‘decision of sense’ (Cassin and Narcy, 1989) is at play as essence) by the principle ‘there is no sexual relation’, which L’Étourdit puts to work even in its portmanteau and palimpsestic title, as close as possible to the signifier, inscribing homonymy and homophony in the letter as the first ‘di[t]mension’ 17 of the Real in ab-sense – while holding fast to the difference between the absence of sense as ‘ab-sense’ and the overly existential ‘non-sense’. Now, the Duchamp du signe trademark, as given in the title assigned not so much to the complete works as to the complexion of a work that belongs equivocally to art (designating, at its simplest, the definitively equivocal field of art), seems to be posited as an intimate heterography of this very passage, even [même]. Except that, in making a hole [faire trou] in art, Duchamp experiments, trying out every possible cut in it, in a constructivism of the signifier that he performs ‘anartistically’, perforating the phallic surface of inscription that will immediately be projected onto those patatopologies whose protocol was drawn up, emphasizing their dit-mensional effect (carefully collected in the notes), from the time of the Large Glass (and all the related doors and windows). All of which suffices to prevent one monotony (no contradiction) being replaced by another one (no sexual relation) which Lacan hyperstructuralizes 18 on the basis of new (non-Aristotelian) logics where it is the exception (‘there is one’) that proves the universal (‘more modified than is imagined in the for all of the quantifier’; Lacan, 2001b: 459; 2009: 56). That ‘there is no universal that must not be contained by an existence that denies it’ (Lacan, 2001: 451; 2009: 36) confirms the rule of a new universal such that, by means of this sophistication of writing, the science of analysis (analysis raised to the rank of a ‘science’) becomes homologous (or enters into hommologue) with a function of phallic knowledge of the Real as ‘ab-sex sense’. According to Lacan, it is necessary to read ‘ab-sex sense’ as the axiomatic retroaction of a ‘gay science [gay sçavoir]’ consisting ‘not of understanding, of stitching meaning, but shaving it as close as possible, without gumming up that virtue’ (Lacan, 1973: 22, translation modified). 19 Duchamp, who, unlike Lacan, will shave sense (and the artwork) close enough to gum up a ‘gay science [gay sçavoir]’ (and a gay ça-voir – see it!) updated for the readymade era of technical reproduction, will on the contrary precipitate, by ironic affirmation of the principle of contradiction, a proof of the phallic monotony of the ‘no sexual relation’ over the most pataphysical critique possible of scientific formalization (his ‘amusing physics’, which also governs the game of the bride) and of the sexuation of its discourse (his position of mastery). He undoes this science (or stops it) through the absurdity of his random ‘de-standardizations’ (the Standard Stoppages) in which the bar of the ‘stallion-standard’ signifier, 20 detached from every real relation of the signified to that which is supposed to produce it, is crossed at the speed of sound. If it is indeed this nominalist cut of the signifier that knots together Duchamp and Lacan, this confirms that the relation is warpedspoken [ourdit] out of a non-relation that produces no structure between them. For, with Lacan, the Lacan of ‘L’Étourdit’ who mathematically restrains the étourdissement, ‘[i]t is only through the test of formalization […] that sense, touched by the real, brings about truth as ab-sense’ (Alain Badiou, ‘Formulas of “L’Étourdit”’; Cassin and Badiou, 2017: 46), an ab-sense correlated with ‘sex’ as stripping bare of the real qua the impossible. The impossibility of any relation, ‘the futility of all intercourse [coït] with the world, in other words what has been called until now consequence’ (Lacan, 2019: 90), is phallically demonstrated in the desire that is topo-logically lacking (the relationship to the law of nature), and which as such can be formalized in the matheme qua most radical subtraction from the world, and so subtracted from the equivocity of language. The ‘absex sense’ of ab-sense, which Badiou uses to his own profit, also (provisionally) puts an end to indetermination in a ‘sort of logical flaying [écorché] of the sexual body making the manifest duality offered in procreation and generation fall back on the symbolic instrument by which all difference in the order of logic and the concept is thought’ (Le Gaufey, 2006: 168). Whereas in Duchamp, from the Large Glass onward, the ab-aesthetic stripping bare and shop-window-displaying of the impossibility of any phallic passage derails Eros and renders it delirious as the presentification of lack. Consequently, the presentation of Eros as Fountain (1917) laid down 21 by the designated R. Mutt who signs it (and dates it with black paint) manifests the delay in porcelain of a ‘mute’ (muten) reversibility of genders/genres, in the form of a dry Mutter (Mutt R.) impossibly placed at the Origin of the World (urmutter) and of the work of art (R) that mutes the mutt or ‘low art’ (that of the plumber, immoral and vulgar). For the hard of hearing: according to Duchamp himself, the urinal upended into a Madonna of the Bathrooms and of onanism had been sent to the Armory Show, who refused its exhibitionism, by one of his female friends under a masculine pseudonym. 22 The Mister (Herr) remained mute (Mutt) – or inter-dicted, transfixed before such a Maldonna (a misdeal, transliterated by Lacan into ‘mâle donne’, a male donation or donor), a double-dealing of the sex-ratio in which the moi-tié fails to find its other half. 23 Unless, that is, we admit that women can raise to the level of the signifier the shoehorn [chaussoir] of castration (Fountain – or the chaussoir of the Buddha of bathrooms?) – which they pass up, all the better to pass it to the homunculus, since ‘there is no sexual relation’. A pass [passe], a trick turned, a conjuring trick [tour de passe-passe], as we have already suggested.
The interdiction of Fountain, following that of Nude Descending a Staircase, the forbidden not so much transgressed as perverted in the direction of the ‘hu/man’ who is the prototype of the same, is indeed the most that could have been done for an ‘artist’ – a (precision) oculist and not an analyst (unless one has passed into the other); more precisely, an artist who makes no secret of his ‘Dadaist defiance’. An anartist, then, and of a peculiarly sophisticated type, since it is anti-philosophy and anti-science that must be ‘placed’ at the beginning of Duchamp’s trajectory as his ‘milieu’, both ab-aesthetic (privative, through the cuttation [coupaison] of the retinal) and absolutely anti-romantic. So that anti-philosophy and anti-science move forward together on condition of the pseudo-reality of the anartist as Duchamp du signe. ‘I’m a pseudo, all in all’ (Tompkins, 2013: 84). If it is indeed the nominalist cut that knots Duchamp with Lacan, its bond is confirmed phenomenally by the staging of the failure of the matheme and its sublation in the poematic calculation of the homophonic games that are so rife in the punning typical of the late Lacan, increasingly as the 1970s, which open with Lituraterre, draw on (that is, wordplay in the form of spoonerisms, ‘literature’ placed under the sign of Joyce). A declension of anti-philosophy into a twofold anti-mathematics: ‘the knot on one side and the poem on the other: the string and the letter’, as Jean-Claude Milner excellently sums it up (Milner, 1995: 168). The string is that of the Borromean knot that resists all mathematical formalization, and of which one must accept being the ‘dupe’ in taking ‘some stupid little thing’ as a foundation. 24 Meaning that the string that must be pulled is not unrelated to the thread of Duchamp’s pseudo-scientific demonstration by Standard Stoppages.
Standard Stoppages of Lacan
If ideally there were to be three moments, the first act is deployed in 3 Standard Stoppages (1913) which de-standardizes (de-stallionizes) the principle of non-contradiction. 2 = 3: this is fundamental, or rather (to borrow from Deleuze) defundamenting (effondamental) or ungrounding, to the (unmeasurable) extent that the 3, which stands as the subversion of the 2 (cipher of contradiction), is enough for chance to impose its anti-scientific and anti-philosophical law, if, following Badiou, we define philosophy (from a ‘classical’ Lacanian point of view) as the subversion of 3 by 2 (Badiou, ‘Formulas of “L’Étourdit”’; Badiou and Cassin, 2017: 56). The one that is no longer equal to itself doubles not into 2 but into 3, the Duchampian number of delinked multiplicity which amounts to denying that ‘there is one’. This 3 is a pure perversion of all trinities, from which one makes sure not to exclude the ‘Père-version’ or ‘Version-toward-the-father’ associated with Lacan’s trinitary knot and ‘non-dupes-errent’. 25
One more reason not to allow oneself to become the dupe of the Real three times over … Stopped, all the better to transform it into something ‘stronger than the true’ (real?). 26 In the form of ‘Stoppages’, one associates the ‘idea of a straight horizontal thread one metre long falling [3 times] from the height of one metre onto a horizontal plane with that of its own deformation as it pleases’. An experiment that results from chance, along the thread of an ‘accident [from which] was born a carefully planned piece of work’. 27
The link between tuchê and repetition qua unlimited pursuit of the real as ‘accidental’ encounter is thus theorematized in the form of a new necessity, that of an automaton manipulated so as to conserve chance and to force the passage to The Idea of Fabrication. This title, stripping repetition bare of all ‘symbolic’ character, is that of the first note in the Box of 1914. It amounts to a radical paradigm shift in (the Idea of) art, of which the readymade, the idea of the readymade, is a contemporary avatar: ‘canned chance’, according to the sibylline phrase used by Duchamp to define his ‘favourite work’. The 3 Standard Stoppages mentally grounded the readymades before Duchamp had found the ‘word’, the wordplay, that would definitively ‘transduce’ The Idea of Fabrication into the Fabrication of the Idea, doubly opposed to the idea of painting as pure, manually-assisted visibility, to which he will object the manufactured chosen by (the use of) chance. This transduction (into the) readymade pro-duces the definitive formula for the destructuring operation by which Duchamp invests with ‘delay’ (he describes the Large Glass as a ‘delay in glass’) the most critical point of his thought. The subtraction from the common world understood as a cut with the symbolic of an art that sublimates it now stands as the nominalist disparation of art. It serves as an encounter with the real, projecting an isthmus (Lacan would say a ‘littoral’) toward eroticism.
What is knotted together in this ‘sort of pictorial Nominalism’ (Duchamp, 1973: 78) practised in the counter-painting of 1913–14 is the machination that would allow Duchamp ‘to make a picture of happy chance’ (Duchamp, 1973: 23) beginning by projecting the possibility liberated by the cut of non-Euclidean geometries 28 onto the perspectival apparatus of the painting taken to the letter (and the most transparent image) of its technical apparatus. Which confirms that 3 Standard Stoppages ought to be contextualized within the perspective of the Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, originally also a painting (a painting ‘of precision’ which lays out its ‘beauty of indifference’ on a ‘long canvas, upright’; Duchamp 1973: 29, 39) and its transformation into a Large Glass. If the latter flays [écorche] the physical laws of our world, it is only so as to figure their distension or distraction, standing – according to the explanation given – for ‘“blossoming” without causal distinction’ (Duchamp, 1973: 42). To be ‘[d]evelop[ed] graphically’, Duchamp specifies, in light of an ‘actual representation [which] will be but one example of […] these principal free forms’ that lose all ‘mensurability’ in the Bride (Duchamp, 1973: 42, 44). The 3 Standard Stoppages is a scale model: a small distension of the geometric line. But then it is the conventionalism of Poincaré – the mathematician-philosopher of the fourth dimension – that finds itself precipitated into a frenzied nominalism that liberates ‘the immensity of immeasurable possibilities’ and invalidates ‘irrationally the concept of the “shortest distance between two points” (classical definition of the straight line)’. 29 An improbable, pataphysically-oriented science-fiction, then, which adopts as part of its stratagem the convenient term ‘standard’ used by mathematicians. ‘Their so-called demonstrations depend on their conventions. It’s all just a matter of tautologies […] Science is only mythology, its laws and even its very matter are pure myths, and have no more or less reality than the conventions of any other game’, says Duchamp (De Rougemont, 1968: 43, 47, emphasis added).
The articulation of anti-science with anti-philosophy is formulated quite radically by Duchamp in another 1914 note which makes of the ‘Principle of Contradiction’ the foundation of the nominalism at work throughout his oeuvre. From the definition that he opposes to the principle of non-contradiction – ‘Co-intelligence of Contraries [abstracts]’ – Duchamp deduces that it is necessary to ‘abrogate every sanction that establishes the proof of this in relation to its abstract contrary that’ (Duchamp, 1999: 112 n185, emphasis in original). To which he then immediately adds: ‘develop’. Less abstractly, then: ‘to statement A, oppose B no longer the contrary of A but different (the number of the B is infinite, analogue of the combinations of a game that would no longer have any rules)’ (Duchamp, 1999: 112 n185, emphasis added). Here we are well beyond the opposition between scientific rules and the rules of games: the new rule of the game is to de-regulate the rules of the game themselves by playing on the difference whose peculiar rule is that it obeys no rules. So that ‘[a]fter multiplying B to infinity. It no longer authorises statement A (a theorem is no longer formulated nor formulable). It liberates the word from definition, from ideal sense’ (Duchamp, 1999: 112 n185, emphasis in original). On this basis Duchamp distinguishes ‘2 stages’: in the first, ‘each word has a present sense defined only for the moment by (sometimes auditory) fantasy. […] the sentence still has a skeleton. (Literary examples: Rimbaud, Mallarmé)’. So here it is a matter of a nominalism of the signifier. In the second stage of nominalism, ‘there is no longer a physical adaptation of concrete words: no more conceptic value of abstract words. The word also loses its musical value. It is only readable’ (Duchamp, 1999: 115). This would be the most radical form of what he calls ‘literal nominalism’ (Duchamp, 1999: 115). An (assisted) textual readymade, then, in which the unleashed telephony of the signifier over the sense that it punctures is brought back to ab-sense, to the pure gap of the signifier; a bachelor nominalism of pure significance which makes a literal operation of the sole subtraction of sense, of the absence of any real relation of the signified to that which causes it, the referent. So that the referent is properly that which the signified misses, in so far as it imagines itself master [maître] of its own being [être], that is to say when it imagines itself not to be language because it doubles it, under the rubric of extension, with an exteriority that is entirely manipulable by dint of approximation, in an nameless ontology that isolates the word ‘being’ [être] as a signifier of Meter [mètre]. The fact that this legitimates the prevalence of mathematical equipment even down to the most rudimentary geometry confirms, in place of the expected pre-discursive proof of the existence of the world, that ‘the signifier commands’ 30 this discourse of being – of ‘being at someone’s heel, being under orders’ (Lacan, 2000: 31, trans. modified), diverted, perverted into the Master-Standard (or ‘Stalliondard’). One might think here of Duchamp’s declaration to Pierre Cabanne: ‘I don’t believe in the word “being”. […] I don’t believe in the word “to be” […] It’s an essential concept, which doesn’t exist at all in reality, and which I don’t believe in, though people in general have a cast-iron belief in it. No one ever thinks of not believing in “I am,” no?’ (Cabanne, 1987: 89–90, emphasis added). From parêtre to s’emblant, if we want to make it resonate with Lacan, 31 but crumpled [chiffonné] in a different way. And for later, in the style of Rrose Sélavy: ‘Metritic system on a gonorrheal day [Le système métrite par un temps blenorrhagieux]’ (Duchamp, 1973: 112, trans. modified]. 32
Machinic Eroticism in the Large Glass and Its Notes
Second Act, that of the Large Glass, from top to bottom a proof, by text and image, but especially via the text that governs the image thus counterfeited, that ‘there is no sexual relation’. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is Duchamp’s grand narrative, scattered across a thousand separate notes and boxed up (the Green Box and the White Box), and which projects onto the Large Glass the writing [écrit] (or descriptive [décrit]) effect of a very technical eroticism, as an isthmus or ‘ism’. The ‘ism’ of Eros will be made up of Oculism, which will also, through an ironism (of affirmation), echo and make heard an au-cul-l’isme (with ‘infra-thin caresses’; Duchamp, 1999: 47 n.28) and the style of lascience – la-science in a single word so as to paraphrase the Lacan of lalangue inverted into a ‘logic of appearance’ (Duchamp, 1999: 47 n.28, emphasis in the original). ‘Eroticism’ will not emerge from this process unscathed: ‘a meta-irony on eroticism’, as Octavio Paz sums it up. Words here become hollow moulds, like the ‘malic [male, phallic] moulds’, made of red lead, essential elements of the ‘bottom’ of the Glass, whose name alone acts as a mould for the Thing, unknown to the battalion of significations except for what can be heard of the signifier in centimeter, senti-meter/master [senti-maître: to make the master-signifier felt], the Thing that the Standard Stoppages will ‘pour’ into the uniforms-units of language. This language has no more proper sense than it does figurative sense, and relates to Nothing, unless to a science-fiction of ab-sense, as the ‘thin blade that slits the identity of things’ (Foucault, 2004: 25), projecting into it a hilarious cosa mentale that deviates from the approved trajectories of the hommologization of the world. As for the Bride, at the top, that empiresse of our supposed coïterations (two of Lacan’s words, in L’Étourdit, that arrive just in time), she is supposed to draw the bachelor-spectator into ‘a cinematic blossoming [épanouissement cinématique]’. But this is put on display in the form of a device that engineers the disappointment of the desiring-perspective of the bachelors below = n − 1, with the four-dimensional counter-perspectivism of the Bride above = n + 1 (her ‘supplementary’ dimension), while taking up in this same device those that we see move behind the glass (and which ‘I am’), in an external world that has passed into the shop window of the most ‘assisted’ readymade that ever was. For it will be a matter – and this is Duchamp’s primary guiding idea – of ‘making an Inscription’ of the blossoming of the bride, but a ‘moving inscription’ whose ‘alphabetic units (their number, form, significance …)’ are to be ‘determine[d]’ (Duchamp, 1973: 38). With the consequent return to a nominalist logistics taken all the way into the void that magnetises it because the passage between the bachelor-machine and the Bride does not entail ‘direct contact’ (Duchamp, 1973: 39); 33 they do not communicate with one another except by signs, and this ‘electrical stripping bare’ (Duchamp, 1973: 42) implies an exchange of sparks at a distance, with a ‘Short Circuit if necessary’ (Duchamp, 1973: 39] 34 or, in other words, a contact that causes its own ‘cuttation [coupaison]’. (Doesn’t Lacan remark that sexus is linked to and detached from secare, ‘to cut’ (Lacan, 2007: 75)?) 35 The ‘passage of the bach. machine to the Bride’ (Duchamp, 1973: 42) thus implies a leap into another level of reality, combining the graph of four-dimensionality with the ‘blossoming’ which, as imaginative ‘stripping by the desiring-bride’ (Duchamp, 1973: 43), is responsible for her halo (a hazy woman [femme nuée]) through which, from her non-perspective, the passage could ideally ‘pass’ – but thwarting the final stage, that of consummation, which she evades. The title however furnishes the import (enunciative and denotative) of what is really supposed to come to pass 36 (if indeed ‘everything revolves around phallic jouissance’; Lacan, 2007: 7), and must without delay be translated into terms of clockmaking, gears, etc., symbolizing the uniform gearing of the two sexes for the ends of reproduction. 37 But it is vis-à-vis this gearing that what he describes as an ‘alternative operation’ (Duchamp, 1973: 39, trans. modified) in respect of the workshop of the (uniformed) bachelors asserts a ‘principle of dissimilation’ 38 in the form of a relation of non-relation that seals the dry dialectical identity of contradictories: There is no sexual relation/There is no relation other than a sexual one. Which also means that, if it is a matter of escaping to a plane other than that of the ‘desire-gears’ (reduced to the smallest part): ‘They are only the string that binds the bouquet’ (Duchamp, 1973: 42), this blossoming is not an ‘emanation’ from the Bride but the Bride Herself as ‘apotheosis of virginity’ (Duchamp, 1973: 39) – the reality of a pure virtual qua the unactualisable of an inter-dicted phallic jouissance: ‘the blossoming of this virgin who has reached the goal of her desire’ – but an ‘ignorant desire’, a ‘blank desire’ [désir blanc] (Duchamp, 1973: 42, 39), ‘before the orgasm which may bring about her fall graphically’. Duchamp adds, in brackets: ‘(will [bring it about])’ (Duchamp, 1973: 43, trans. modified). All that remains, then, in order to flee the agricultural assimilation 39 of the tool-machine (There is nothing but the sexual act), is to counter-effectuate and re-dress the celibate machine (There is no sexual relation, but only the ‘monotonous flywheel’ of an ‘onanism’ – ‘horizontal’ – for two) 40 by producing its faultiness [malfaçon] and its very male fashion [mâle façon], the better to take this latter into the nets and readymades of language. Sent by the mysterious R. Mutt, which we can now decompose into ‘R M u-t-t’, giving us ‘Ready-made eût été [Readymade would have been]’ – and it would have been, had it not immediately been snatched away from the public gaze (and the ‘original’ lost) – the readymade female pissoir will be named Fountain (1917). Laying down, it will rise humorously at the frontier of the ‘arrose’ and ‘c’est le vit [it’s the member]’ of Rrose Sélavy. ‘The word “arrose” demands two Rs, so I was attracted by the second R’ (Cabanne, 1987: 65). A Rrose in which Duchamp does not change sex without changing sex ‘itself’. Sex or asex, which can be heard behind the privative of a rather uncommon feminine la (sexe) when the vir is swiftly [vite] passed to the virgo detached from all ‘lack’ behind her veil. 41 The Voie lactée, or the voile acté?
To paraphrase Lacan, ending up by stunning [étourdir] the Freudian field from below the bar of the quantifier: in denying that there exists one, one insists that there ex-sists at least one through which the forall, the forallmen, is fornotalled – not to wager on the ab-sense of the sexual relation 42 but to be adorned with the Name-of-the-Father in its male-fashioned faultiness [malfaçon]. Something that is formulated in the Abridged Dictionary of Surrealism (1938) as follows: ‘Low/Stockings. – Silk stockings … the thing in itself too [Bas – Des bas en soie … la chose aussi] Rrose Sélavy’ (Duchamp, 1973: 107). 43 That is, the Kantified perversion of a thing-in-itself watering [arrosant] with its rose-water name the Father-One [Un-Père] in the ‘mi-lieu’ of its desertlike Freudian thing.
Rrose Sélavy, Or the Trans-formation
Third act, that of the permeability of genders, with a Belle Hélène as the surprise guest of the anartist who, in 1922, abandons the Large Glass as definitively unfinished.
The inversion of gender, attacking the oh-so-phallic subject-function of the author by rebirthing him in a feminine makeover of the masculine, will have taken place ‘autobionomastically’ in Marcel Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy (1920–21), a very soft-focus photograph (a pictorialist portrait) by Man Ray. We see Duchamp in a made-up hypography,
44
swaddled in a coat with a fur stole and sporting a hat borrowed from Picabia’s mistress. He also borrows her arms and hands (she is hidden behind him for the trick shot to be taken), in a mannered pose underlined by the dedication (to the viewer) written on the left fore-arm: ‘Lovingly, Rrose Sélavy alias Marcel Duchamp’. Duchamp explains his change of identity into an alias as follows: In 1920, I decided that it didn’t suffice me to be a lone individual with a masculine name, I wanted to change my name in order to change, for the ready-mades above all, to make another personality from myself, you understand, to change names, simply. (Duchamp, 2002: np)
Or even: Given that the arrhe of painting is feminine in gender – since Étant donnés, the other side of the Large Glass, ‘consists’ in inscribing, in a celibate optical illusion, ‘the retinal impression (and other sensory consequences)’ of the pornographic shop-window-display of the Nude fallen from her pedestal. Except that Étant donnés is not the hyperrealist image of the stripping-bare evaded in the Large Glass, but the ‘allegorical appearance’ of a pornoscopic execution of appearances carried out in the mode of the hyperreality of an overimage [surimage] that draws the gaze into a game of lures and trompe-l’oeils. One cannot simply declare, then, with Lyotard, that in Étant donnés there is ‘nothing to be seen but a vulva, and for that reason nothing but a cunt to see with [rien qu’un con pour voir]’ (Lyotard, 2010: 49). Far rather, what is seen in Étant donnés is a assembling/showing [mont(R)e] of the Rrose-scented trap that lies in wait for anyone who wants to see like an idiot [en con] … and anyone that would seek to represent it: a ‘hussy’s’ cunt [un con de ‘gourgandine’]. For what Duchamp re-presents is the fundamentally unheimlich anti-anatomical gaping hole of an ‘erogenous zone’ which the drive isolates and which is given as the fact of a cut and a partial trait; this ‘trait of the cut’ bound for a ‘partial object’ that is not part of ‘a total object that would be the body’ is not so much that which lacks through excess so as to forge the identity of a subject and the totality of an identifiable subject, as the very montage of a phantasm whose mount [monture] it turns inside out, turning it from ens privatum (the object of privation) to nihil negativum (a voided or barred object, the void of a non-object) by attacking the identification with the image that it precipitates. Which is why the false-vagina of the pieced-together mannequin obstinately refuses to be penetrated by the gaze and offers no return to the origin or the Origin of the World, to that place that we come from and go (in)to 46 but which, for Duchamp, on the contrary, would be the locus of the impenetrability of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Isn’t this ‘even [même]’ the precipitate of a non-relation?
Endgame Strategy
If it is indeed here, and on the occasion of the dinner hosted in Paris at the end of September 1958 by the Lacans for the Duchamps, that the relation is knotted between the two men, both of whom had ‘frequented’ surrealist milieus; and if the conversation would have to have turned around Courbet’s painting (L’Origine du monde, 1866) which, as we know, Lacan had owned since 1955, it is the relation of a non-relation to The Origin of the World that we must posit in extremis as the principle of the Duchamp-Lacan relation. At play here is the entire difference between the act of presenting, in painting, the female genitalia for itself, as Courbet does (Courbet, who avoided cosa mentale painting like the plague), and the act of refusing to allow it to appear except for and through a voyeur’s gaze. An appearing [paraître] or parêtre whose montage and montrage makes necessary the whole apparatus of Étant donnés, methodically organized according to the ‘operations’ catalogued in the Instruction Manual (Duchamp, 2009) – operations which all involve the voyeur and have one sole purpose: to ensure that he is not allowed to see, through the two miserable holes of a closed door, the supposedly ‘erotic’ scene, without also perceiving something of the ‘dangerous supplement’ (of a fourth, posthumous act) that renders him subject to the hole that he believes he sees as an object (in perspective) but which gazes out at him from a dark cut which is less that of a hole [trou] than that of a turn [tour], a trick to make him fall from the hole of the hardening band. This twistedly complex device forces the gaze into the trap that it sets to undo that ‘appetite of the eye […] filled with voracity, the evil bad eye’ (Lacan, 1977: 115), the dark side of the eye nourished and taken in by the cache-sexes of painting which Courbet only brings down in order to entertain the real image of the bouquet bent over by the spectator. To trump the trompe l’oeil of the origin of mimesis-painting by unveiling its hidden pornoscopy may be the first watchword of ‘looking at seeing’ in the shop-window of Étant donnés. For its apparatus forces the eye to adopt the vision of the voyeur, which the looker has already endorsed by gluing to the door his scotomised gaze via a split [fente] and a re-splitting [refente] of/in space. This space is arranged in such a way that it will be the slamming shut [rabattant], to use Lacan’s word once again, of ‘the geometral function of images’ onto the ‘domain of voyure’ where the subject, subjected to it, can only support itself on the blindness of its desire. To the intention of this male gaze is objected, as a fact of castration, 47 the inevitable maldonne/mâle donne of his Madonna.
The object, the non-object in the form of an objection, arranges the passage from ‘nothing but a cunt [rien qu’un con]’ to ‘false cunt [faux con]’. Something that Duchamp suggests in relation to a 1968 engraving entitled Morceaux choisis d’après Courbet: in his comments on the work he explains the addition of the bird introduced into the foreground of his ‘representation’ of the Woman with White Stockings (Courbet, 1861): ‘He’s curious, and furthermore he’s a falcon, which in French yields an easy play on words [i.e. faucon = faux con]; so that here you can see a false cunt and a real one’ (Schwarz, 1970: 885). Curious, indeed, this ‘he’ taking the place of the expected ‘it’ for a bird that in no way represents to the naked eye a ‘falcon’, which it absolutely does not resemble: the false image of a falcon, a faux ‘falcon’ which, rather than a bird of prey, looks more like a ‘parrot’ … or the ‘stool pigeon’ which then I am, as a true fool [vrai con]!
One With My Tongue in My Cheek (1959), we might add, in reference to Duchamp’s ironic self-portrait (a death mask in progress?) which belongs to a series of moulds made in interseXion with Étant donnés. After all, didn’t he include in the Eighth International Surrealist Exhibition (1959–60), to which he himself (together with Breton) had given the theme of Eros and Eroticism, this ‘bas-relief’ that literally puts the tongue [la langue] into the cheek so as to make it inflate – and it is ‘with the inflation of this lack-of-sex-sense (sens-absexe) that a topology is unfolded where it is the word that decides’ (Lacan, 2009: 38). Except that here the word decides in favour of the falcon, the faux con of a Virgin who will never have been MARried, except to marCEL. 48 Escaped from a ‘fauconnière’ that is never closed without also being open, the virgo has never allowed herself to be taken into the phallic enclosure of the vir, going right ahead to achieve the declension or her ‘ether’ into the insubordinate hetera, Rrose Sélavy. Rrose, c’est la vie, Eros is the life of the Insubordinate to the Two of the heteros that only makes One via the encounter of castration, where the signifier-woman is inscribed as privation (of the phallus) 49 in a dimension of the semblant that one might, with Lacan, étourdire at will without changing anything in the symptom except its writing as synthome and its rewriting of the hetera as hétaïra. 50 Now, as we know, the hétaïre of Ancient Greece was a euphemism for pornè, a prostitute trained for phallically-oriented jouissance (turgor) for he whom ‘L’Étourdit’ qualifies as ‘hommosexuated’ or ‘hommosexual’. The two m’s belonging to the man sexuated by the omos, the same [même] in Greek which makes the similar into a hard band [qui fait ‘bande’] in the marking of the non-relation to the ‘notall’ of the woman erecting the phallus in the ‘empty’ space of her ‘lack’.
Whether or not it was because this hyperstructuralist portrait of woman as hétaïre may justifiably be said to belong to a Freudian field familiar to the surrealists, in any case Duchamp did not hesitate to get a shot of the aforementioned ‘void’ of these ladies, as Impair (pronounced Un-Père, One-Father) et Manque in the ‘Rue Surréaliste’ which, upon his initiative, served as the entry corridor into the International Surrealist Exhibition (1938), populated by 16 mannequins. Among them we find the mannequin of Rrose Sélavy, assembled by Duchamp in the simplest possible get-up, arranged according to an top/bottom: top: curly wig, made-up face, wearing a man’s hat and clothes like a businessman; bottom: nude, apart from casual men’s shoes, bringing into relief the ‘faux con’ highlighted on the groin with the handwritten inscription, in capital letters, ‘RROSE SÉLAVY’ (the second R is very developed), and again underlined in absentia by the plaque put up alongside the transgender mannequin: ‘Rue aux lèvres [Street of Lips]’.
There is more here than a prefiguration of Étant donnés, and of its realization or pro-duction of the prosthesis of a ‘faux con’ that does over the derisory exhibition of the supposed feminine ‘castration’ by staging the oculophallocentrism that serves as its vector, referring it back to the phallophany of the voyeur. A voyeur who has every reason to be surprised by what he discovers little by little of the mannequin deposed by those operations of approximation (enumerated in the Instruction Manual) which relate not to sex but to the hinges of the montage which must remain ‘hidden’. A dismantlable puppet which in truth makes little secret of its montage of detached pieces. In Frederick Kiesler’s words: ‘joints are dangerous links; they tend to dis-joint’ (Kiesler, 1937: 56). The dissimilation extends to the whole body, in a game of re-splitting [refente] between genders, facilitated by the elision of the face. The transition between water and gas in Étant donnés and in its full title (Étant donnés: 1/ the waterfall, 2/ the lighting gas) which takes up, to the letter, the enunciation that figures as a preface to The Bride Stripped Bare … in the Green Box also circles back to ‘Water and Gas on Every Floor’ (1958). Which then suggests their coming together in the word AUER (the phallically-shaped Bec Auer type lamp of Étant donnés, a ‘gas pipe’) which – ‘be aware’ – refers to the O and R of Rrose Sélavy. And in the ultimate ‘mirroric return’, the ‘cinematic blossoming’ of the Bride into … what Arturo Schwarz describes as a ‘self-induced orgasm’ (Schwarz, 1970: 244).
The circle may be a vicious one but, ultimately, replaying the ‘film’ of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even in the light of its terminus in Anemic Cinema, from the cutting of the view onto the vulva, then, we see the surface of the voiding, ceci n’est pas un con, via the effect of its afterwardsness, provided with a recto and a verso, without one needing to tack, or choose a side, in order to access its underside: the Chocolate Grinder (1912) ‘mounted on a Louis XIV nickelled chassis’, which already uses the colours of the Bride (1912). The grinder of a bachelor who has hardly got out of the infans stage, mixing up his ‘milk chocolate’ (or his ‘milky way’), even. Where even [même] here means, unequivocally: without allowing oneself to be impressed by the ‘great scissors’ of the ‘Bayonet’ of the machine that cannot shut (the principle of their fixation to the ‘Slide [Glissière]’ inter-dicts it). 51 ‘The blades cannot close, thus the threat of castration is cancelled’ (Schwartz, 1970: 178).
The veil is drawn up [le voile est acté].
‘Daggers drawn [à coups trop tirés] perhaps, but firing blanks [tirés à blanc].’
In this way, the mounting/showing [montRage] (with this Rrose-tinted R) of Étant donnés gives (onto) a long chain of signifiers which, the better to transform it, refers the seXual chiasmus to the regime of infra-thin games of calibration of the coincidence of contraries. The scopophilic installation of the muse in the museum finds itself transported into the totality of the Duchampian circuit, precipitating the Master-Signifier into a final cul de sac, ‘the phallus [as] the privileged signifier of this mark in which the role [part] of Logos is wedded to the blossoming of desire’ (‘The Signification of the Phallus’; Lacan, 2006a: 581).
And God knows, Duchamp certainly played dirty with that which stands for it in art: – superficially and, via the auditive hole, orificially, even … before driving it to the wall.
A brick wall.
Translation Robin Mackay