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Jean-Michel Rabate. Duchamp's Ego
For Marjorie Perloff, who heard the paper as it was presented
at the second Modernist Studies Association conference
in Philadelphia and knew she was its ideal addressee.
My main task in this paper will be to wonder whether the philosophical elements scattered in Marcel Duchamp¡¦s oeuvre allow us to reconstruct a type of coherence that would account for discrepancies or contradictions in his often enigmatic production. My title alludes to the strong impact of
Max Stirner on Duchamp. It should also underline the difficulty of dissociating the artist¡¦s works from his life. The concept of the Ego, I hope to show, should not be read merely in a philosophical or in a biographical manner, but half-way between the two. Like Picasso, who was originally
very close to Catalan anarchism, Duchamp¡¦s first years in Paris were
influenced by the then dominant anarchist culture in the Montmartre
Bohemia. It is ironical that Picasso and Duchamp met only once, and then
on a note of ironical defiance and misunderstanding which may call up the
incident opposingWilliam CarlosWilliam andDuchamp, when the former
was almost brought to tears by what he took to be Duchamp¡¦s icy irony
facing his youthful adulation in New York. Picasso and Duchamp were
then both living near rue Lepic in Montmartre, a place that at the time
was a centre of anarchist circles and cafe¡¦s in Paris.
I shall try to negotiate between the two major philosophical traditions
indicated by Duchamp himself, philosophical anarchism on the one hand
and early scepticism on the other, two schools whose criss-crossing lends a
particular style to Duchamp¡¦s thinking. Duchamp quoted more precisely
two names when he had to assess his philosophical position, and named
two philosophers he read with passion in 1913 when he was an assistant
librarian at the Bibliothe`que Sainte Genevie`ve (let us imagine him sitting
on the seat by the window overlooking the Panthe¡¦on that Joyce had
occupied when reading Aristotle¡¦s complete works in French translation
only ten years earlier, i.e. 1903): Pyrrho and Max Stirner.
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online c 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09502360410001693911
Textual Practice
Pyrrho is known as the founder of scepticism, but at the time
Duchamp read him he was totally obscure, overshadowed by Sextus
Empiricus who quotes and probably distorts him systematically.He enjoyed
a revival in French academic circles in the 1920s, when Le¡¦on Robin gave
philosophical dignity to his work, going so far as to call him the unknown
¡¥hero¡¦ of philosophy.1 It is quite likely that Duchamp read Victor Brochard¡¦s
Les Sceptiques grecs, published in Paris in 1887, and perhaps Waddington¡¦s
Pyrrhon et le Pyrrhonisme, which had been translated into French in 1877.
What we know of Pyrrho (about 365¡V275 ǵǶ), the founder of the sceptical
school, is limited, but there is one detail that may have triggeredDuchamp¡¦s
interest: Pyrrho is the only classical philosopher known to have begun his
career as a painter. Born into a poor family in the city of Elis, he started as
a poet and a painter (one painting at least has been described in Elis; it
represented a procession ¡V or ¡¥theory¡¦ ¡V of torch-bearers). Some twenty
years younger than Aristotle, Pyrrho became a disciple of Anaxarchus and
then followed Alexander during his conquest of Asia, thus witnessing the
creation of a new political world based on new values. Alexander himself,
earlier taught by Aristotle, was during his conquests under the influence of
Anaxarchus, and, in the type of magnificent gesture he was known for, gave
Pyrrho 10,000 gold coins the first time he met him, after, it is true, Pyrrho
had recited a poem to his glory.
Having seen India and debated with its wise men, Pyrrho returned
to his native city in Peloponesus, where he founded a very successful
philosophical school. He reached the estimable age of 70. He had been
easily impressed in his young age, but he later mastered the art of
impassibility; if a prospective disciple came to see him, and, not convinced
by his explanations, turned away, Pyrrho would continue his speech
imperturbably after the other had left. He would often leave and travel
without warning his close friends or disciples, and would be seen in strange
places talking to himself. He was nevertheless very much appreciated by
his fellow citizens, since he was asked to become a high priest in Elis where
his statue could be found a century later.
Pyrrho preached and practised ¡¥indifference¡¦, a term that hesitates
between ¡¥humility¡¦ and ¡¥neutrality¡¦.He would pretend never to pay attention
to the world around him, refusing, for instance, to go out of his way to
avoid a dangerous dog or a precipice. This became a sort of spiel or wellrehearsed
joke in the school: somebody would pretend to be about to fall
into a hole, only to be saved by the others at the last minute. Pyrrho,
similarly, would never try to influence anyone around him, leaving others
free to do what they wanted. The keyword in his teaching was ¡¥ataraxia¡¦,
which is not so original, except that it leads from practical wisdom to
considerations of an epistemology that may be summed up in the phrase:
¡¥No more this than that¡¦. A favourite example of his was provided by the
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Jean-Michel Rabate¡¦ Duchamp¡¦s Ego
little pigs he pointed out to his disciples once they were on a ship during a
violent storm: the pigs continued eating without being afraid or bothered,
and according to Pyrrho they were right. Indifference, both as being
¡¥adiaphoros¡¦ and ¡¥astorgos¡¦ (without affect) leads to a radical ¡¥apathy¡¦ which
also involves some form of ¡¥aphasia¡¦. Aphasia does not designate a speech
defect, but a state of ¡¥non-assertion¡¦ that leads to a final annulment of
differences: ¡¥Pyrrho said there was no difference between being alive and
being dead¡¦, a rather paradoxical idea to which I will return below.
The basis of Pyrrho¡¦s teachings was that the nature of things was ¡¥indifferent¡¦
(a-diaphora), ¡¥im-ponderable¡¦ (a-stathme`ta) and undecidable
(an-epicrita). Since one cannot judge, one cannot assert or negate anything,
the best thing is to let oneself drift in the unceasing flux of things. This
quietist doubt aims at ¡¥divesting¡¦ man of any certainty so as to denude him;
divest him of all the trappings of the world. This is the main rule to follow
if one wants to live happily in this world. This attitude is complex, and in
fact we are not sure either of what Pyrrho actually taught, but it found at
least in Montaigne an adequate literary expression in French. Philosophically,
one may say withMarcel Conche (who wrote on Lucretius,Montaigne,
Bergson and Nietzsche) that Pyrrho is the first philosopher who stressed
the ontological dignity of appearance. In Pyrrhon ou l¡¦Apparence,2 Conche
shows how Sextus Empiricus had distorted Pyrrho¡¦s teachings; whereas
Sextus points to the misleading character of mere appearances, in order to
assert a deeper reality, Pyrrho radically abolished any distinction between
Being and Appearing ¡V a distinction that had underpinned all philosophies
so far (with the possible exception of Heraclitus). On Conche¡¦s account, if
we follow Pyrrho, appearance is not appearance of (a being) or appearance
for (a subject), but an absolute appearing:
But, one will say, in order to appear, one needs to ¡¥be.¡¦ Surely, but
what does ¡¥to be¡¦ mean? And if ¡¥being¡¦ only meant ¡¥appearing¡¦ and
nothing more? If everything only shimmers for a moment, what can
we say? That nothing is, for there is, all in all, only a present
that collapses without leaving anything, just traces which, one day,
inexorably, will also be erased.3
A lot has been written on Duchamp¡¦s studied or natural indifference,
on a curious listlessness that seemed at times to border on the pathological.
I would like to add a few remarks on the links between the ready-mades
and this pervasive principle of indifference. Against all those who would
try to see aesthetic values in his ready-mades, pointing out, for instance,
how the famous urinal could be seen as a perfect oval suggesting the
stylization of male and female shapes, Duchamp would always assert that
these objects had not been chosen for their aesthetic qualities but had to
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be seen as ¡¥indifferent¡¦, and extolling precisely the ¡¥liberty of indifference¡¦
that abolishes boundaries between art and life. The only ready-made that
seems to escape from this lack of aesthetic qualities is the first object
transformed by Duchamp, the bicycle wheel. Talking about it, he would
say that the object had a beautiful simplicity and was in fact pleasant to
see, relaxing even, once it had been fixed on to a stool. This is, for instance,
Tompkins¡¦ point when he tries to see a contradiction inDuchamp¡¦s attitude.
My perception is different; if we see this as an immediate application of
Pyrrhonian principles (the wheel was made in 1913, the year Duchamp
started reading Pyrrho), it becomes plausible that the soothing effect is less
aesthetic than a conceptual paradox linking kinetic to static properties. By
which I characterize the paradox of a wheel that has been arrested, as it
were, and is used to turn in the air but not on the ground. What is then
seen is the way the spokes blend graciously into a whirl and then a pure
nothingness, until speed decreases and they can be individualized again.
Besides its being the quintessentially Jarryan object, the bicycle is here
reduced to its principle ¡V the wheel. (In French, the phrase: ¡¥Il n¡¦a pas
invente¡¦ la roue¡¦ is commonly used to suggest that someone is not too bright.
Let us note, however, that the Incas and Aztecs managed to build all their
pyramids without having discovered the wheel.) The wheel on a stool is
thus the Pyrrhonian object par excellence: as a bachelor machine it uses
speed for and in itself, not so as to progress in the world but in order to
create a sweet and gentle blur, suggesting a hypnotic state of annulment, a
double abolition of the vehicle it both allegorizes and cancels.
But philosophy¡¦s time progresses indeed by cycles, and in his attempt
to master that field, Duchamp had to become a Beckettian cyclist and he
needed a second wheel. The second philosopher Duchamp discovered as
an alter ego was Max Stirner. Stirner obviously belongs to a totally different
context, that of the Left Hegelians of Berlin, the group of revolutionary
¡¥free men¡¦ associated with the Rheinische Gazette. He was a friend of
Friedrich Engels who seemed to admire him at first, a dangerous leaning
that was not at all shared by Karl Marx. Stirner¡¦s main position appears for
the first time in several articles written for the Gazette in 1842, especially a
text on ¡¥Art and Religion¡¦.4 In substance, Stirner declares that religion is
man¡¦s main enemy as soon as it plays the part of Romantic or ¡¥idealizing¡¦
art; religion makes ¡¥creatures¡¦ of us, thus compelling us to forget that we
are fundamentally ¡¥creators¡¦ of forms and values.
Stirner¡¦s life is almost more obscure than Pyrrho¡¦s. He too seems to
have had poor origins and to have known poverty. Destitution was
interrupted only briefly when he married for the second time (the first wife
having died very young) the flamboyantMarie Da¡Lhnhard, a radical member
of the Berlin Freien; she also owned 30,000 thalers, which Stirner soon
squandered. The story of their hilarious marriage (there was no ring,
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Jean-Michel Rabate¡¦ Duchamp¡¦s Ego
everybody was drunk and playing cards, the bride arrived very late) might
easily call up the strange incident in Duchamp¡¦s life when he took the
sudden decision to marry someone he had described as a ¡¥very fat woman¡¦,
Lydie Sarazin-Levassor. This took place in June 1927 and seems to have
been motivated above all by Duchamp¡¦s belief that Lydie was going to
inherit a fortune. When it turned out that she had been partially disinherited
by her parents and had only a limited dowry, Duchamp lost interest and
they divorced in a friendly manner six months later.
Stirner¡¦s main book Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844) was
translated into English as The Ego and His Own. Benjamin Tucker had
made Stirner his god, and his motto ¡¥Egoism in Philosophy, Anarchism in
Politics, Iconoclasm in Art¡¦ sums up the general ideology of the American
avant-gardists, until it also became the official doctrine of the British writers
gathered by Dora Marsden in the New Freewoman later called The Egoist.
One may say that Stirner had undergone a revival in the first years of the
twentieth century possibly under the influence of Nietzsche. In The Ego
and His Own, Stirner simplifies the system of Hegelian idealism by
distinguishing between two main periods, the ¡¥Ancients¡¦, or classical
wisdom, and the ¡¥Moderns¡¦, which he identifies with Christianity. We are
of course ¡¥Modern¡¦, but still haunted by Christian theology, because it is
based upon a mystique of transcendent love and combats constantly the
egoism of those who refuse to sacrifice their personal interest to a cause.
Here is how Stirner presents the teachings of the ¡¥Romantics¡¦ ¡V in terms
that will curiously reappear in the first lines ofMarx¡¦s and Engels¡¦ Manifesto
of the Communist Party:
Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Nay, it itself ¡¥walks,¡¦
it is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body
of a spirit, it is a spook . . . to you the whole world is spiritualized,
and has become an enigmatic ghost; therefore do not wonder if you
likewise find in yourself nothing but a spook.5
Facing a modernity that he sees as fundamentally haunted, Stirner
finds a point of resistance in the ¡¥Ego¡¦ and posits transcendental egoism as
the weapon against the domination of abstract ideas and causes. The Ego
is the modern tool that corresponds to what ancient wisdom had tried to
erect as a dam against the encroachments of the ¡¥world¡¦:
The break with the world is completely carried through by the Sceptics.
. . . According to Pyrrho¡¦s doctrine the world is neither good nor bad,
neither beautiful nor ugly, but these are predicates which I give it.
. . . To face the world only ataraxia (unmovedness) and aphasia
(speechlessness ¡V or, in other words, isolated inwardness) are left.
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There is ¡¥no longer any truth to be recognised in the world,¡¦ things
contradict themselves; thoughts about things are without distinction.6
However, Stirner believes in a truth, even if it is as paradoxical as the world
depicted by scepticism, and it is a truth founded on the Ego. It is difficult
to sum up this treatise which, once it has asserted the principle that the
Ego owns itself and should never be owned by anything exterior to itself,
is condemned to repeat the thesis with rhapsodical variations.
I will focus only on the vexed issue of ¡¥love¡¦ in Stirner¡¦s philosophy. If
Christianity is relentlessly denounced as an ethics of love as reciprocity and
altruism, Stirner nevertheless conceives of the possibility of love in terms
that are curiously ambivalent, if not bisexual. ¡¥I love men too, not merely
individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of
egoism; I love them because love makes me happy. I love because loving is
natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no ¡¥¡¥commandment of love¡¦¡¦.¡¦7
Fair enough ¡V but then this statement leads to: ¡¥I can kill them (other
men), not torture them¡¦8 before launching into a disquisition on Euge`ne
Sue¡¦s Mysteries of Paris and the wickedly sadistic Prince Rudolph. Stirner
finds accents that call up Lautre¡¦amont¡¦s Chants de Maldoror:
If I see the loved one suffer, I suffer with him, and I know no rest
until I have tried everything to comfort and cheer him. . . .But because
I cannot bear the troubled crease on the beloved forehead, for that
reason, and therefore for my sake, I kiss it away. If I did not love this
person, he might go right on making creases, they would not trouble
me; I am only driving away my trouble.9
Stirner refuses to admit that love can be exercised in the name of an
external value: the egoist will love just because this love exalts him
and provides a higher form of satisfaction. This leads to the somewhat
paradoxical notion of a ¡¥community of egoists¡¦ ¡V and to the almost Sadian
idea that the others are not my ¡¥equals¡¦ but can become my property:
No one is my equal, but I regard him, equally with all other beings, as
my property. . . . For me no one is a person to be respected, not even
the fellow-man, but solely, like other beings, an object in which I take
an interest or else do not, an interesting or uninteresting object, a
usable or unusable person.10
Is Stirner presenting an atheistic parody of Bentham¡¦s utilitarianism?
Stirner would probably have been forgotten as an oddity, a bizarre minor
Hegelian comparable to such wacky French anarchists as Proudhon, Fourier
and the other ¡¥utopian socialists¡¦, had he not become the butt of Marx and
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Jean-Michel Rabate¡¦ Duchamp¡¦s Ego
Engels¡¦ ferocious humour in The German Ideology, a text that monumentalizes
him by making him the main adversary, the individualistic petit
bourgeois opposed to the cause of communism. For them, The Ego and His
Own embodies the mainspring of ideology as such. For when Stirner¡¦s
¡¥unique¡¦ Ego is reduced to the function of a ghost, it shows that a
ghostly ideology can reign. Stirner becomes the whipping boy of historical
materialism, and in order to criticize him, Marx and Engels feign a tactical
incomprehension of the parodic tone so crucial in The Ego and his Own in
that they deliberately remain deaf to the ironies that are rife in Stirner¡¦s
evocation of a ¡¥phantasmagoria¡¦. It is true that Stirner does not explain the
history of Christianity through the ¡¥empirical conditions¡¦ and ¡¥industrial
relations and relations of exchange¡¦ connected to a given form of society.
ForMarx and Engels, Stirner remains a prisoner of the Spirit he denounces:
by dint of crying ¡¥ghost¡¦ he has effectively transformed himself and his
conceptual world into a spectral phantasmagoria.
The dialectic of an anti-dialectic enunciation invented by Stirner
heralds crucial insights such as Nietzsche¡¦s critique of the substantial self
(there is at least one allusion to Stirner¡¦s ¡¥Unique¡¦ in Thus Spake Zarathustra),
of Adorno¡¦s ¡¥negative dialectics¡¦, or of Blanchot¡¦s Neuter, with the concept
of a neutrality more passive than passivity. The ¡¥I¡¦ only calls itself ¡¥Ego¡¦ to
transcend itself and vanish once again in its own enunciative process. This
is above all why Stirner¡¦s affirmation of the ego meets Pyrrho¡¦s withholding
of any assertion. Both positions yield a paradoxical foundation upon the
simple ¡¥subject of the enunciation¡¦ as Lacan would say; that is, a subject
that is a mere cut or hole in a chain, a speaking or writing ¡¥ego¡¦ that
manages to invert the All into Nothing and vice versa. The famous final
paragraph of The Ego and His Own confirms this view:
I amowner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique.
In the unique one, the owner himself returns into his creative nothing,
of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it
man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the
sun of this consciousness. If I have concern only for myself (Stell¡¦ Ich
auf Mich meine Sache), the unique one, then my concern rests on its
transitory, mortal creator, who consumes himself, and I may say:
All things are nothing to me.11
A more literal translation might be: ¡¥I have founded my cause on nothing
[Ich hab¡¦Mein¡¦ Sach¡¦ aufNichts gestellt]¡¦. Stirner not only invented anarchism,
he also posed the question taken up by Lacan about the paradoxes of
subjective enunciation. This generates the paradoxes visible in the last
sentences of the book:
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The conceptual question, ¡¥What is man?¡¦ ¡V has then changed into the
personal question, ¡¥Who is man?¡¦With ¡¥what¡¦ the concept was sought
for, in order to realize it; with ¡¥who¡¦ it is no longer any question at all,
but the answer is personally there present at once in the asker: the
question answers itself.12
Stirner extols the pleasure of life perceived as the Ego¡¦s auto-delectation
and self-erasure: everything is Ghost for the mill of the unique Ego. Being
All and Nothing at once, the Ego introduces a non-totalizable negativity
into the world. This position, clearly more Fichtean than Hegelian, leads
to an unassailable position, all the weaker indeed, since it cannot be refuted,
except, of course, if one convinces the Ego that he is just another ghost.
Which is what Marx and Engels attempted to do in The German Ideology,
with some success.
However, the ghost (or its ¡¥old mole¡¦ at least) surfaced again half a
century later. The historical context of Duchamp¡¦s discovery of Stirner
places him alongside Pyrrho in the context of a broad definition of
anarchism; Stirner is not a purely rhetorical anarchist who betrays a
fundamental political quietism or reactionary leanings. Martin Buber
described Stirner as a ¡¥pathetic Nominalist¡¦ [ein pathetischer Nominalist]. It
is true that his philosophy leads to a ¡¥pathetic apathy¡¦ in the name of a
wholesale critique of all causes and dogmas written in the first person. The
main effect of his book, repetitive as it is, is to produce an identification of
the reader with der Einzige ¡V the Unique One, who owns himself and
therefore owns nothing. A particular grammar of affirmation and negation
is thus posited, which curiously is not that far from Pyrrho¡¦s complex
dialectics of non-affirmation.
How can this network allow us to make sense of Duchamp¡¦s work
and evolution? While I am not claiming that this double philosophical
discourse will explain everything in Duchamp, I believe that it can throw
some light on what remains ¡V for me at least ¡V the main paradox in
Duchamp¡¦s career, namely the apparent discrepancy between the logic
underpinning his two major works, the Large Glass (The Bride Laid Bare
byHer Bachelors, Even) andE¡¦ tant Donne¡¦s. . . . The paradox is often presented
in terms of a betrayal of the avant-gardist if doomed project of a purely
conceptual work attempting to evoke for the mind only all the tensions
implied by sexuality and its dead-ends (the upper and lower halves of the
glass suggest the impossibility of direct sexual relationships, and the
unfinished emanations that move from bottom to top call up a sublimation
process closer to a masturbatory model of activity), by the interaction
between human desire and the machine, and more momentously by the
riddle of the fourth dimension, evoked obliquely through the mental
calculus of several ¡¥time-images¡¦ (as Deleuze said after Bergson) ¡V hence the
228
Jean-Michel Rabate¡¦ Duchamp¡¦s Ego
function of the Green Box as the necessary conceptual part of the visual
apparatus presented in the museum.
I have briefly outlined a few aspects of La Marie¡¦e mise a` nu par ses
ce¡¦libataires, me.me so as to call up the often baffled reaction to E¡¦ tant
Donne¡¦s. As Tomkins¡¦ biography infers, the main link would seem to be
the autobiographical aspect of both works, since one moves from a cryptic
signature ¡V Marie¡¦e and Ce¡¦libataires yielding ¡¥Marcel¡¦ ¡V but how do we
know it is not a meditation on Marcel Proust? ¡V to a tableau vivant that
both commemorates and embalms for good Duchamp¡¦s erotic relationship
with Maria Martins. Although I do not want to dismiss the autobiographical
relevance of these themes, I would like to suggest a way of understanding
how the ¡¥definitively unfinished¡¦ project of La Marie¡¦e ¡V a radically
Pyrrhonian examination of life seen under its most important aspects ¡V
could lead to the strangely frustrating trompe l¡¦oeil of E¡¦ tant Donne¡¦s . . . ,
a work in which the so-called ¡¥return¡¦ to classical perspective may be read
either parodically or seriously. It becomes obvious then, to follow my
terms, that E¡¦ tant Donne¡¦s. . . . should appear as a Stirnerian work: the Ego
has merely to be transformed into an eye/I by an obvious pun, it shows
that the gaze of the I discovers its field of vision as ¡¥its own¡¦ object,
namely Nature seized in its broadest determinations, the flux of a
Heraclitean time and the ¡¥gas¡¦ concealing both ¡¥chaos¡¦ (Beckett reminds
us of this curious proximity in Murphy) and the source of light without
which we could not see anything. The apparatus of classical perspective
is requested to universalize the I/ego/eye: it is only thanks to classical
perspective that one can reach the conclusion that ¡¥egoism¡¦ may be shared
by all. We share it when we recognize simultaneously how deluded we
can be by the fetish of sexuality (the gaping cunt of the pig-skin woman)
and the conventional nature of representation, and how easy it is to just
go on living in the world of pure appearances.
The convergence between Pyrrho and Stirner also allows Duchamp
to solve the last remaining paradox concerning his apparent compliance
with the classical ¡¥rules¡¦ he had apparently always wished to subvert. It is
crucial here to distinguish between repetition and reproduction. While
Duchamp wished to avoid repeating himself at any cost, he was never
opposed to the idea of playing the game of artistic or industrial reproduction.
He was notoriously ambivalent facing the market of symbolic goods,
since he would criticize the commodification of artistic egoism ¡V he once
asked: ¡¥Why should artists¡¦ egos be allowed to overflow and poison the
atmosphere¡¦?13 ¡V while on the other hand he knew how to play on this
market by manufacturing or supervising the reproduction of limited series
of copies of copies of his own works.
We can therefore understand what Duchamp meant when he said to
Katharine Kuh in 1962 about the invention of the Bride that he was not
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involved in artistic narcissism: ¡¥I was never interested in looking at myself
in an esthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself,
though. I know perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game
between ¡¥¡¥I¡¦¡¦ and ¡¥¡¥me¡¦¡¦.¡¦14 This did not prevent him from asserting that ¡¥art
is the only form of activity in which man shows himself to be a true
individual¡¦. All this of course, with the touch of sardonic humour that
became Duchamp¡¦s signature. It is nowhere more apparent than in the
epitaph he had chosen for himself. ¡¥D¡¦ailleurs, c¡¦est toujours les autres qui
meurent.¡¦ The strange motto inscribed on his tombstone means: ¡¥Besides,
it is always the others who die.¡¦ As he had confided, he was a ¡¥pseudo in
all¡¦15 and he believed that one never ¡¥knew¡¦ one¡¦s death: ¡¥The main thing is
to die without knowing it, which incidentally is always that way¡¦, he had
said when his old friend and lover Mary Reynolds was about to die.
Vladimir Nabokov had not thought otherwise when he had John Shade
express a similarly foundational sophism:
A syllogism: other men die; but I
Am not another; therefore I¡¦ll not die.16
One might want to examine more closely the curious syntax of Duchamp¡¦s
epitaph: in good French, one would expect ¡¥D¡¦ailleurs, ce sont toujours les
autres qui meurent¡¦ [Besides, these are . . .]. The choice of a spoken level of
style contradicts the solemnity of the occasion, of course, and one might
see something else looming out of Duchamp¡¦s engraved dying words. He
might be echoing in this ¡¥c¡¦est toujours . . .¡¦ the famous signature of Rrose
Se¡¦lavy, a rose blossoming as Rose, c¡¦est la vie. It is a phrase one often says in
English, generally when someone dies: C¡¦est la vie! . . . Deleting the accent
of the last name, thus cutting the rose¡¦s thorn, Man Ray had already
distorted the phrase into ¡¥Rose, cela vit!¡¦ (or ¡¥Rose, IT lives¡¦, or, better,
¡¥Rose, the Id lives!¡¦). By superimposing life and death in these last words,
Duchamp finally exemplifies Pyrrho¡¦s principle of the equivalence between
life and death. Indifferent to the end, he shows that death is a productive
grammatical mistake, a calculated misprint that will transform a Pyrrhic
victory into Pyrrhonian transcendence.
University of Pennsylvania
Notes
1 Le¡¦on Robin, Pyrrhon et le scepticisme grec (Paris: PressesUniversitaires de France,
1944,), p. i. See also Le¡¦on Robin, La Pense¡¦e Grecque et les origines de l¡¦esprit
scientifique (Paris: Renaissance du Livre, 1923).
2 Marcel Conche, Pyrrhon ou l¡¦Apparence (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1994).
3 Ibid., p. 271.
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Jean-Michel Rabate¡¦ Duchamp¡¦s Ego
4 Max Stirner, ¡¥Art and religion¡¦, in Lawrence S. Stepelevich (ed.), The Young
Hegelians, An Anthology (New Jersey: Humanities Paperback Library, 1983),
pp. 327¡V34.
5 Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, translated by S.T. Byington and revised
by David Leopold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 36.
Hereafter abbreviated as EO.
6 EO, p. 26.
7 EO, p. 258.
8 EO, p. 258.
9 EO, p. 259.
10 EO, pp. 275¡V6.
11 EO, p. 324.
12 EO, pp. 323¡V4.
13 Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp, A Biography (New York: Henry Holt,
1996), p. 419.
14 Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Marcel Duchamp, p. 251.
15 Ibid., p. 445.
16 Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 40.
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