Reflections on Duchamp Bergson Readymade

Federico Luisetti
David Sharp

diacritics, Volume 38, Number 4, Winter 2010, pp. 77-93 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Reflections on Duchamp
Bergson Readymade

Federico Luisetti

[I]nside the person we must distinctly perceive, as through a glass, a set-up

mechanism.
—Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (1901)

In spite of the enormous critical attention paid to Marcel Duchamp’s art and theoretical
background, the dialogue with Bergsonism is mostly confined to scattered references and
erudite observations.1 Paradoxically, the major obstacle to this encounter has been the
immense popularity of Henri Bergson’s philosophy since the initial decade of the twen-
tieth century. Such success has come with a price, however, for the proliferation of neu-
tralizing schematizations has progressively suffocated the specificity of his thought and
subsequently impeded the understanding of his epistemological radicalism, so cherished
by Duchamp and the historical avant-garde.2
Consider, for example, how the specter of Bergson constantly hovers over Linda Dal-
rymple Henderson’s authoritative discussion of Duchamp’s scientific sources. Although
Henderson recognizes the diffuse presence in Duchamp of various Bergsonian motives,
because she regards Bergson as the antiscientific philosopher of the “inner self” and of
“profound self-expression,”3 Bergsonian notions seem to her incompatible with the artis-
tic revolution prompted by Duchamp. A historiographical exorcism is therefore needed
in order to heal the consequences of the traumatic Bergson-Duchamp incest. Herein lies
Henderson’s solution: since Duchamp rejects the aesthetic principles of the Puteaux Cub-
ists, he also abandons Bergsonism, which represents their philosophical matrix. Thus, the
Bergsonian ideas “undoubtedly” present in Duchamp’s artistic lexicon are nothing but
debris accumulated in the course of his battle with the Cubist disciples of Bergson.4
To counter these approaches, in the following pages I will map Duchamp’s absorp-
tion and creative distortion of Bergsonism,5 concentrating on key terms of both Berg-
son’s philosophy and Duchamp’s speculations on art: space, “readymade,” delay, body,
virtual, circuit, machine.6 I will then discuss the theoretical implications of Duchamp’s
Bergsonism and place the readymade7 within its proper context: the deconstruction of the
Western metaphysics of reflection.

1. On the influence of Bergson, see Beier; Davies; Henderson, Duchamp in Context; Antliff.
Duchamp’s biographers have not failed to uncover Bergson’s influence: see Tomkins 68.
2. My aim is to provide further evidence to Ivor Davies’s critical intuition: “Yet Bergson’s
views are eminently applicable to his Large Glass, and even seem relevant to his attitude to aesthet-
ics in general” [“New Reflections on the Large Glass” 88].
3. See Henderson, Duchamp in Context 120.
4. In the wake of Davies, in various passages of her study Henderson recognizes Duchamp’s
Bergsonism; see Henderson, Duchamp in Context 35, 84, 96, 97.
5. See in particular Deleuze, Bergsonism.
6. On Bergsonism and the digital image, see Hansen.
7. “According to Bergson, such intellectual ideas, ‘which we receive ready-made [tout fait],’
must remain external to the inner self of artistic creation. Bergson’s use of the term tout fait in this
context and in Le Rire, to signify the very state of being external or mechanical that Duchamp was

diacritics / winter 2008 diacritics 38.4: 77–93 77

Space

Beginning with Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson distinguishes between two types
of multiplicities: on the one hand, “duration” (durée), “an internal multiplicity of suc-
cession, of fusion, of organization, of heterogeneity, of qualitative discrimination . . . a
virtual and continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers,” and on the other,
“a multiplicity of exteriority, of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, of order, of quantitative
differentiation . . . a numerical multiplicity, discontinuous and actual.”8 This opposition is
generally understood as a clear-cut differentiation between the inner experience of time
and the objective consistence of space. In Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory
(1896), there are several passages that can be read accordingly, since duration is often
described as a continuous, indivisible temporal experience, and space as that which “by
definition, is outside us.”9
Yet for Bergson space and time are mixed terms, and their internal complexity does
not coincide with the semantic distinction between the two multiplicities. Deleuze has
clearly formulated the central difficulty that a reductionist theory of space and time would
imply, a problem of which Bergson is fully aware. Since the concept of duration has an
ontological span, space must find a place within time and vice versa: “If things endure,
or if there is duration in things, the question of space will need to be reassessed on new
foundations. For space will no longer simply be a form of exteriority. . . . Space itself will
need to be based in things . . . to have its own ‘purity’” [Deleuze, Bergsonism 49]. Hidden
behind the motif of the “spatialization of time,” Bergson has devised a stratified theory of
space, whose origins we can trace back to his philosophical apprenticeship [see Heidesick
29–42].
Departing from Kant, Bergson introduces a boundary between the “perception of
extension” and the “conception of space,” between qualitative space, which he calls
“extensity” (étendue), and “abstract,” “homogeneous” space: “We must thus distinguish
between the perception of extensity and the conception of space. . . . [S]pace is not so
homogeneous for the animal as for us . . . determinations of space, or directions, do not
assume for it a purely geometrical form” [Bergson, Time and Free Will 96]. Our habitual
reference to space alludes to a mere “symbol of fixity and of infinite divisibility.” On the
contrary, “concrete extensity, that is to say, the diversity of sensible qualities, is not within
space; rather it is space that we thrust into extensity” [Bergson, Matter and Memory 216].
Furthermore, in several texts Bergson provides accounts of the metaphysical genesis of
spatiality, describing the ontological dimension genetically prior to both empirical space
and lived time.10 In this conceptual constellation we can detect Bergson’s most original

seeking, suggests that the philosopher’s terminology lies behind Duchamp’s adoption of its English
translation, ‘ready-made’, once he was in New York” [Henderson, Duchamp in Context 63]. Here
Henderson takes up a suggestion of Davies, “New Reflections on the Large Glass” 87–89.
8. Deleuze, Bergsonism 38. As Deleuze has demonstrated, the distinction between the two
types of multiplicities is indebted to the mathematical theories of Riemann [39–40], who, in turn, is
a primary sources of the conceptual architecture of The Large Glass. Bergson’s approach is shaped
mainly by his interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature and by the debate on the metaphys-
ics of the continuum; see Bergson, Quid Aristoteles de loco senserit.
9. Bergson, Matter and Memory 206. According to Bergson, the fallacious spatialization of
duration encouraged by common sense and language—“which always translates movement and
duration in terms of space”—is at the origin of Zeno of Elea’s paradoxes. If we reconstruct move-
ment with points and lines, we miss the inner nature of mobility, and, with Zeno, we end up negating
the reality of movement: since “it is impossible to construct, a priori, movement with immobilities,”
Achilles will never outrun a tortoise and, at every moment, a flying arrow will be motionless; see
Bergson, Matter and Memory 191–92, and Bergson, Creative Evolution 308–14.
10. See Bergson’s description of the “simultaneous genesis of matter and intelligence” [Cre-
ative Evolution 199–208].

78
contribution to philosophy as well as the theoretical sources of Duchamp. Borrowing
from Bergson’s terminology, the distinction between “space” (espace) and “extensity”
(étendue)11 is the premise that sustains the aerial saga of Duchamp’s most complex work,
The Large Glass.
Going back to Aristotle’s naturalism, Bergson considers bodies, movements, and
boundaries as the basic elements of reality: “Thus, the space of our geometry and the
spatiality of things are mutually engendered by the reciprocal action and reaction of two
terms which are essentially the same, but which move each in the direction inverse of the
other. . . . All that which seems positive to the physicist and to the geometrician would
become, from this new point of view, an interruption or inversion of the true positivity.”12
Beginning with the doctoral dissertation on the Aristotelian conception of movement,
Bergson constructs a vocabulary of boundary-functions that, beyond the better-known
formulations of duration, undergirds the building of his philosophy: “Extension, we said,
appears only as a tension which is interrupted” [Creative Evolution 267]. Time-space
multiplicities are intersected by mechanisms of interruption, inversion, and delay similar
to those that govern Duchamp’s practice of the “mirrorical” (miroirique).13 Neither actual
nor virtual, the mirrorical operations generate the topological structure of an extended
present, the multiple and deferred location of Duchamp’s readymades.

Readymade

“Speculations. Can one make works which are not works of ‘art’?” [Writings of Marcel
Duchamp 74]. Duchamp’s answer is the readymade: “In 1913 I had the happy idea to fas-
ten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn. . . . It was around that time that the
word ‘readymade’ came to my mind to designate this form of manifestation” [Writings
141]. The readymade is a nonartistic work, a postponement of the aesthetic delectation
of the work of art.
We are familiar with Duchamp’s exemplary readymades: wheels, combs, snow shov-
els, bottle and coat racks, birdcages, and the famous porcelain urinal entitled Fountain
and signed “R. MUTT, 1917” [fig. 1]. These programmatic works illustrate the basic
function performed by Duchamp’s objects. As a parody of the phenomenological return
to the perceptual consistency of the “things themselves,” they appear to be merely exist-
ing objects, pieces of the external world without symbolic connotations. Yet, because of
their provocative “thingness,” they refuse to be assimilated to the mechanisms of repre-
sentation and stand as something in between, occupying the interval between everyday
objects and artworks.
At this level of perception, the readymades’ enigmatic presence is nothing but a
form of existence that has abandoned the heavy machinery of representation: logical
and linguistic definitions, conceptual schemes, analogical connections, iconographic
references—in Duchampian words, “visual memory.” The exhibition of the thing “in-
itself” simply shows that the work is more—or less—than a representation. Since the

11. Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du signe: Écrits 134–35. In the English translations of the
Notes, étendue is often rendered as “space,” thereby neutralizing Duchamp’s distinction between
étendue and espace; see Writings of Marcel Duchamp 94–95.
12. Bergson, Creative Evolution 202, 208. Bergson’s theory of nonrepresentational space is
the aspect of his philosophy that has more profoundly influenced the development of early twenti-
eth-century visual art, in particular Italian Futurism.
13. The élan vital is creative only to the degree to which it delays the unfolding of inert mat-
ter: “Incapable of stopping the course of material changes downwards, it succeeds in retarding it”
[Creative Evolution 268].

diacritics / winter 2008 79

readymades have lost their connection with the instruments of representation, they don’t
criticize or negate artistic representation and its mighty institutions, such as museums
and art-historical scholarship: weakly and humbly, they have found a collocation in the
incommensurable intervals of a new method of appearance.
The puzzling consistency of the readymades has been repeatedly singled out by Du-
champ: “Ultimately, it should not be looked at. . . . It’s not the visual aspect of the ready-
made that matters, it’s simply the fact that it exists. . . . Visuality is no longer a question:
the readymade is no longer visible, so to speak” [“Marcel Duchamp Talking” 37–40].
Although the readymade is primarily a common object, selected and displayed according
to certain instructions and accompanying titles and comments, its aporetic nature and
visual indifference, in between the inherited categories of art discourse, has triggered the
dislocation of traditional oppositions such as original and reproduction, the art world and
the external world, the visual and the textual, form and the formless, aesthetic judgment
and sensory recognition. For instance, George Dickie has tenaciously explored the ready-
made’s destabilizing effect on the institutional location of art, and Thierry de Duve the
“nominalist” turn prompted by Duchamp`s “intellectual expression” [see Duve, Pictorial
Nominalism and Kant after Duchamp; Dickie].
Yet what can we say about the “simple existence” of the readymade, its immanent
yet enigmatic nature? Gilles Deleuze has called attention to the Bergsonian distinction
between the “virtual” and the “possible.” While the possible is a retrospective duplica-
tion of the real, an abstract copy of the real, marked by a ghostly likeness, the virtual is
endowed with a full reality: “The possible is the mirage of the present in the past. . . . It
is as though one were to fancy, in seeing his reflection in the mirror in front of him, that
he could have touched it had he stayed behind it. . . . But the possible so understood is in
no degree virtual, something ideally pre-existent” [Bergson, The Possible and the Real
119].
The virtual, as “something ideally pre-existent,” is real, but it is not actual. Instead of
being opposed to the real—as in the case of the possible—the virtual stands against the
actual. In the formulation of Marcel Proust, often recalled by Deleuze, the virtual is “real
without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” Given this definition of the real and
the possible, Deleuze draws the following conclusion: “when someone asks what more is
found in the real, there is nothing to point out except ‘the same’ thing as posited outside
representation” [“Method of Dramatization” 101].
The position of this “more” outside representation is precisely the gesture performed
by Duchamp’s readymades. Their objectuality acts as a cut, a caesura between the merely
existent “real” and the ghostly lawful possible. Through this deconstructing movement,
Duchamp achieves a new nudity for art, a new naiveté. Since it has renounced the laws,
habits, and processes of representation, the readymade’s “visuality is no longer a ques-
tion.” From the point of view of the identifying power of cultural vision, the readymade
“is no longer visible.” Our attempt to reach an appropriate concept of the object is des-
tined to fail.
If we thought that Fountain was what we know a urinal is supposed to be, its deceit-
ful title and signature force us to reconsider this assumption. Since we can’t rely on a
straightforward relationship between the abstract scheme of the thing and the thing itself,
the readymade’s presence becomes unstable, and the object’s identity is distorted by the
lack of visual and conceptual memory. Our efforts of interpretation are blocked, and we
are left with the existence of a thing standing enigmatically in front of us, outside repre-
sentation. The readymade has become an impossible object: “To lose the possibility of
recognizing 2 similar objects—2 colors, 2 laces, 2 hats, 2 forms whatsoever to reach the
impossibility of sufficient visual memory” [Writings 31].

80
Delay

The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), also known as The Large
Glass [fig. 2], is Duchamp’s most intricate readymade. At The Philadelphia Museum of
Art since 1954, The Large Glass is executed on two panels of glass, one of top of the
other, with materials such as varnish, lead foil, fuse wire, and dust “crystallized” on the
surfaces. After eight years of work on the piece, in 1923 Duchamp abandoned the project
and declared it “definitively unfinished.” Severely damaged in 1927, The Large Glass
was repaired by Duchamp in 1936. In 1934, Duchamp published a voluminous set of
preparatory notes (The Green Box), followed in 1966 by another set of notes and draw-
ings (The White Box, or À l’Infinitif); in 1980 a posthumous collection of notes (Marcel
Duchamp: Notes) was edited by Paul Matisse.

For the “Box” of 1913–1914, it’s different. I didn’t have the idea of a box as
much as just notes. I thought I could collect, in an album like the Saint-Étienne
catalogue, some calculations, some reflections, without relating them. Some-
times they’re on torn pieces of paper. . . . I wanted that album to go with the
“Glass,” and to be consulted when seeing the “Glass” because, as I see it, it
must not be “looked at” in the aesthetic sense of the word. One must consult
the book, and see the two together. The conjunction of the two things entirely
removes the retinal aspect that I don’t like. It was very logical. [Duchamp, qtd.
in Cabanne 42–43]

Placed in this infrarepresentational space, The Large Glass stages a paradoxical event:
a “blossoming” (épanouissement) of the desire of the “bride” in the upper panel, and a
“dazzling” (éblouissement) of the gas, metamorphosed into liquid and light, of her nine
“bachelors” (the “malic moulds”) gathered below in the lower panel, amidst a bizarre me-
chanical apparatus: a “chocolate grinder,” a “water mill” mounted on a “sliding chariot,”
“scissors” and “capillary tubes,” “sieves,” and “oculist charts” engraved on the glass by
Duchamp using a scalpel.
Stripped by the short-circuit generated by the contact of her desire and the gas flow
of the bachelors, the bride drops her dress on the “garment line”—the upper one of three
strips of glass that separate the two panels—and explodes into the aerial forms of the
upper part: “hanging female,” “wasp,” “milky way,” a “meteorological extension.”14 In
his scribbled notes, Duchamp defines as “virtual” the images on The Large Glass: “The
reflection (virtual images) in a mirror” [Writings 48]. Why are these images virtual and
not mimetically specular, as in the case of the art-historical images that sustain the repre-
sentational possibility of traditional artworks? At a thematic level, the work is organized
according to a rigid dualism which clearly reproduces the Bergsonian distinction between
the actual and virtual: the upper and lower halves are exchanged with one another like the
actual (the actions of the bachelors, subject to the laws of causality) and the virtual (the
“body without organs” of the bride).
The three transparent stripes of glass that separate the two panels are a further indica-
tion that Duchamp, following Bergson, considers the actual and the virtual as incongru-
ent, different in kind, nonsynthesizable polarities:

Let me repeat, then, an explanation I suggested in Matter and Memory. The

memory seems to be to the perception what the image reflected in the mirror is
to the object in front of it. The object can be touched as well as seen; acts on

14. The most comprehensive description of The Large Glass is provided by Suquet.

diacritics / winter 2008 81

 Fig. 1: M. Duchamp, Fountain. Signed “R.
MUTT, 1917.” Original photographed by Alfred
Stieglitz after the 1917 Society of Independent
Artists exhibit.

Fig. 2: M. Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915–23. Oil, var-
nish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels. 9 feet 1 ¼ inches x 69 ¼ inches (277.5x175.9cm). The
Philadelphia Museum of Art.

82
 us as well as we on it; is pregnant with possible actions; it is actual. The image
is virtual, and though it resembles the object, it is incapable of doing what the
object does. [Bergson, “Memory of the Present and False Recognition” 165]

However, again following Bergson, Duchamp maintains that the actual and the virtual
coexist simultaneously; they belong to the tense, impure existence of things. Like this
paradoxical life, The Large Glass is an impossible object, a nonrepresentational marriage
between the mechanical power of the bachelors and the ultradimensional powerlessness
of the bride. Given this Bergsonian topology, Duchamp’s readymades are conceived as
mechanisms for escaping the laws of representation and interweaving the virtual and the
actual while at the same time preserving their heterogeneous natures.
In order to distinguish this apparatus from the “mirage” of possibility, Duchamp
introduces the neologism “mirrorical reflection” (renvoi miroirique) [Writings 63, 65]. A
“mirrorical reflection” is a disjunctive operation: “the separation [écart] is an operation”
[qtd. in Cabanne 49]. The bride and the bachelors reflect each other mirrorically, through
a system of multiple operations—optical, geometrical, metaphysical, and pataphysical—
that produce both the communication and the autonomy of the two dimensions.
All the operations that belong to the grammar of the mirrorical reflection, accumulat-
ed by Duchamp on the glass and in his notes, can be reduced to a fundamental mechanism
which contains the genetic matrix of The Large Glass: delay. The Large Glass is a “delay
in glass”: “use ‘delay’ instead of picture or painting; picture on glass becomes delay in
glass—but delay in glass does not mean picture on glass—” [Writings 26]. Delay is the
temporal dimension of the readymade.
The constructive practice of delay is the hidden logic of the readymades, which ac-
counts for their positive relationship with virtuality and points toward the overcoming
of their enigmatic existence outside the boundaries of art-historical representation. “By
planning for a moment to come (on such a day, such a date, such a minute), ‘to inscribe
a Readymade’—the Readymade can later be looked for—(with all kinds of delays). The
important thing is just this matter of timing, this snapshot effect, like a speech delivered
on no matter what occasion but at such and such an hour. It is a kind of rendez-vous”
[Writings 32]. The instructions that integrate the visual appearance of the readymades
and the careful planning of the works are not universal schemes. Their performance is
activated exclusively by a postponement in which the object enters the logic of a conjunc-
tive separation, becoming a “kind of rendezvous,” a work that is readymade only under
certain unpredictable conditions: “delay itself is the pure form of time in which before
and after coexist” [Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 124].
This timing, which depends on chance and subjective dispositions inscribed in the
structural fabric of the work—for instance the unfinished nature of the readymades—
deconceptualize the retinal consistency of the work, dislocating art in the indeterminate
unfolding of the tension between waiting and resolution, expectation and fulfillment, vir-
tuality and actuality.
The Duchampian logic of deferment, which transforms each work into a puzzling
object, simultaneously present and retarded, and multiplied into a vertiginous number
of operations, is understandable exclusively against the background of the Bergsonian
conception of duration. According to Bergson, duration is what replaces the illusory non-
dimensionality of the present with an “elastic” bloc of segments that coexist within an
operational dynamism. These segments comprise a temporal span; they last, because they
are tensed up between the immanent polarities of the powerless past and the active pres-
ent. Like the readymade, a bloc of duration continuously frustrates the instantaneity of the
present.
We don’t need to speculate about Duchamp’s awareness of this vocabulary. In his
most explicit confession of his debt to Bergsonism, the posthumous notes to The Large

diacritics / winter 2008 83

Glass, Duchamp cites duration—although with a question mark—describing it as the
coexistence of past and future fractions of temporality: “—in each fraction of duration
(?) all / future and antecedent fractions are reproduced—All these past and future frac-
tions / thus coexist in a present which is / really no longer what one usually calls / the
instant present, but a sort of / present of multiple extensions—” [Marcel Duchamp: Notes
135n].
Here lies the secret of Duchamp’s rejection of works of art in the name of readymade
works. If the images of traditional art are inextricably linked to the myth of an instant
present—the present of production and reception, of interpretation and communication,
of marketing and taste—Duchamp’s conversion to the Bergsonian logic of delay trans-
forms artworks into nonrepresentational works of multiple extensions. Because of the
inscription of the operations of deferral, the readymade enters the territory of the Bergso-
nian durée, becoming a continuous multiplicity; a perceptible object and yet something
which is no longer what we assume an artwork to be. It is an answer to the question: “Can
one make works which are not works of ‘art’?”
Duplicated into diverging series of sensations and information, opticality and textual
instructions, the works-delay of Duchamp are accompanied by a suspended visuality. The
Large Glass is exposed to the law of impossibility. If memory consists of a freestanding
presence of the past—in a subject as memory, in an artwork as iconographic stratifica-
tion—the readymade prescribes amnesia. The cognitive dislocation triggered by Duch-
amp’s postponements is contrasted to the “stupidity” of the eye, generating an unstable
field of perception. The readymade eviscerates the eye’s power of assimilation.
In order to elude the immediacy of vision, Bataille deprives the eye of its optical
capacities and makes it a “pineal eye” [see Bataille]. Duchamp selects a Bergsonian ap-
proach and inserts a mirror into the objects. The specularity of The Large Glass carries
out the same function that Bergson assigns to mirrors each and every time he makes refer-
ence to them in his texts: it subdivides the instant into two incongruent series, the virtual
and the actual.15 The intellectual expression of Duchamp’s art corresponds to the pecu-
liar impure texture assigned to images by Bergson, more than a representation but less
than a thing, “an existence placed halfway between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation’”
[Bergson, Matter and Memory 9]. The readymade stands in between, at the intersection
of pure memory and perception, it is neither empirical nor abstract, neither objective nor
subjective. Duchamp’s works are suspended images, a mix of virtuality and actuality.
Consequently The Large Glass is not a painting but a mirror-machine in which the virtual
and the actual communicate at their limits. Based upon an elaborate apparatus of non-
representational operations, The Large Glass becomes a labyrinth of mirroring functions
that suspend the work’s presence and the instantaneity of its fruition, delaying immediacy
without introducing symbolic mediations. The virtual is a postponement of the appoint-
ment with sense, it empties time of all interiority and spaces temporality.

Body

“Suppose there are so many kinds of possible action for my body: there must be an equal
number of systems of reflection for other bodies; each of these systems will be just what

15. “Our actual existence then, whilst it is unrolled in time, duplicates itself all along with a
virtual existence, a mirror image. Every moment of our life presents two aspects, it is actual and
virtual, perception on the one side and memory on the other. Each moment of life is split up as and
when it is posited. Or rather, it consists in this very splitting, for the present moment, always going
forward, fleeting limit between the immediate past which is now no more and the immediate future
which is not yet, would be a mere abstraction were it not the moving mirror which continually re-
flects perception as a memory” [Bergson, “Memory of the Present and False Recognition” 165].

84
is perceived by one of my senses. My body, then, acts like an image which reflects others,
and which, in so doing, analyzes them along lines corresponding to the different actions
which it can exercise upon them” [Bergson, Matter and Memory 49]. As in Bergson, im-
ages in The Large Glass are not modeled on the reflexive logics of representation. They
are movements: the mechanical automatism and material “spontaneity” of the lower re-
gion, the “pulsation” and meteorological “vibrations” of the bride. Images are the site of
the object’s implosion, of its vivisection in nonoverlapping parts. The Large Glass is an
impossible body, like the bride’s nongeometric shape: “In the bride, the principal forms
are more or less large or small, have no longer, in relation to their destination, a mensura-
bility” [Duchamp, Writings 44].
In Bergson images escape binary logics, since they release their effects only by being
captured by the central machinery of the biological body.16 As in Spinoza, images are af-
fections of the body, imagines vel corporis affectiones. In The Large Glass, the bride—a
temporalized body delayed in the fourth dimension—is selected as the “life center” of
the work. Given the movemental consistency of images, according to Bergson “the in-
determination of the movements . . . will express itself in a reflection upon themselves
or, better, in a division, of the images that surround our body” [Matter and Memory 64].
Accordingly, The Large Glass is conceived by Duchamp as a “dizziness” [Writings 50],
an apparatus of dissimilation of the body of the bride.
The bride is a “thermic machine” activated by the onanistic actions of the bachelors;
the warm rejection that she opposes against the desire of the bachelors triggers a short
circuit from which arises a spark that ignites the gas of the bachelors. The bride undresses
herself, sets down her dress on the upper transversal, and explodes into “freed forms”:
pendue femelle, wasp, milky way, garment, top inscription.
In the lower region

. . . a gas (whose origin is unknown) is cast in the Malic Moulds into the shapes of
nine bachelors. The Gas escapes from the Moulds through the Capillary Tubes,
where it is frozen and cut into spangles and then converted into a semi-solid fog.
The Capillary Tubes lead the Spangles to the opening of the first Sieve. Sucked
by the Butterfly Pump, the Spangles pass through the Seven Sieves, and in the
process they condense into a liquid suspension. The liquid suspension falls into
the Toboggan and “crashes” at its base. [Schwarz 37]

Lucia Beier has called the attention to the surprising resemblance that Bergson’s thermo-
dynamic description of the élan vital17 carries to the tortuous energetic trajectory of the
bachelors’ gas in The Large Glass. Like the élan vital’s evolutionary differentiation, the
flowing energy of the bachelors undergoes a differentiation in order to pass into the upper
region; in Duchamp’s terminology, the “illuminating gas” of the bachelors, transformed
into liquid spangles and splashes, is “dazzled” by the oculist charts. The continuity of the
élan is fragmented by a system of feedbacks: “The mirrorical drops not the drops them-
selves but their image pass between these 2 states of the same figure” [Writings 65].

16. “Here, in the midst of all the images, there is a certain image which I term my body and
of which the virtual action reveals itself by an apparent reflection of the surrounding images upon
themselves” [Writings 48].
17. “steam escaping at high pressure through cracks in a container . . . ‘the steam thrown into
the air is nearly all condensed into little drops which fall back and this fall represents simply the
loss of something, an interruption, a deficit’” [Beier 198].

diacritics / winter 2008 85

Virtual

“More generally, in that continuity of becoming which is reality itself, the present mo-
ment is constituted by a quasi-instantaneous section [coupe] effected by our perception
in the flowing mass, and this section is precisely that which we call the material world.
Our body occupies its center” [Bergson, Matter and Memory 139]. According to Bergson,
everyday perception operates through functional cuts, interruptions of movements whose
purpose is to act efficaciously on external matter. Because of their utilitarian simplicity,
these quasi-instantaneous cuts are responsible for the illusion of the nondimensionality
of the instant.
Given these presuppositions, Duchamp envisions a new art of cutting, a practice of
interruptions that carries out the task assigned by Bergson to art: the extension of per-
ception, the expansion of the human sensorial body, the construction of a new topology
of the virtual. The observations contained in The White Box illustrate the geometry of
virtual images of The Large Glass. The apparatus is based on a mirror-machine whose
cuts generate, in accordance with the theories of Dedekind and Poincaré, n-dimensional
geometric spaces.18
To begin with, the bride is a projection of a four-dimensional reality: “and my bride
for example would be a tri-dimensional projection of a quadri-dimensional bride. Very
good. But as it’s on glass, it’s plane, and so my bride is the bi-dimensional representa-
tion of a tri-dimensional bride who is herself the projection of the quadri-dimensional
bride into the tri-dimensional world.”19 The virtuality that surrounds the two-dimensional
elements of The Large Glass is the result of a progressive spatial demultiplication of
the bride’s n-dimensional essence, sustained by the laws of geometric projection. Fur-
thermore, The Large Glass is marked by a transformative specularity. Duchamp is not
interested, like Derrida, in crossing the mirror and rendering the bottom transparent to
philosophical reflection. The Large Glass is not a “mirror of a mirror” [Derrida, Dis-
semination 317] but a mirror-machine, not a phenomenological mirror but a Bergsonian
mirror. The two regions reflect one another disjunctively. “Perhaps make a hinge picture.
(folding yardstick, book) develop the principle of the hinge in the displacements 1st in the
plane 2nd in the space. Find an automatic description of the hinge” [Derrida, Dissemina-
tion 26]. An indivisible machination, The Large Glass functions as a hinge that articulates
the separation-operation of the bride and the bachelors.
Together with delays and cuts, Duchamp exploits the principle of incongruence—
symmetry and yet nonsuperimposibility of shapes onto the plane. For instance, the right
and the left hands are incongruent since, in order to overlap, it is necessary to make
them rotate in a three-dimensional space; merely transporting them onto a plane is in-
sufficient.20 The Large Glass applies this principle to the bride. If, in order to remove
incongruence in a two-dimensional space, it is necessary to introduce a rotation around a
hinge that produces a higher dimension, the “incongruence between volumes would re-
quire that you have at your disposal a fourth dimension, one that might be suggested by a
tri-dimensional mirror, for instance, a mirror with three faces that all reflect one another”
[Lyotard 60].

18. For Duchamp’s sources on the fourth dimension see in particular Craig Adcock, Marcel
Duchamp’s Notes from the Large Glass: An N-Dimensional Analysis. Dedekind’s cuts are men-
tioned by Duchamp in À l’Infinitif (The White Box); see Writings of Marcel Duchamp 94. On Du-
champ and Poincaré see Adcock, “Conventionalism in Henri Poincaré and Marcel Duchamp.”
19. Duchamp to George and Richard Hamilton, quoted in Lyotard, Duchamp’s TRANS/form-
ers 88.
20. On the Kantian and Bergsonian approach to incongruence, see Heidesiek, Henri Bergson
et la notion d’espace 52.

86
 In accordance with this geometry, the two regions are connected by three strips of
glass. The median bar acts as a hinge between the upper strip (the “garment” of the bride)
and the lower strip (the “horizon” of the bachelors, the vanishing point of their geometric
projection). A central body-hinge is added to the spaces of the bachelors and the bride; a
mirror of three faces that sustains the incongruence between the two regions, triggering
the virtuality of the work. Due to this purely operational function, the transversals are
totally transparent and devoid of iconographic inscriptions.21
In addition to the principle of incongruence, the three transversals perform the func-
tion of cut of the virtual volumes of the two spaces of The Large Glass. Duchamp con-
ceives the transversals also as traces of the power of cut that, in the n-dimensional ge-
ometry of Dedekind, creates dimensions of higher order.22 If a three-dimensional space
is intersected by a two-dimensional surface, a three-dimensional boundary is needed for
cutting a four-dimensional extension, the virtual region in which the bride’s saga takes
place. The hinge of The Large Glass is at the same time a boundary of three faces that
reduces spatial incongruences and a mirror-cut endowed with the power of connecting
spaces of heterogeneous dimensionality.
As a result of these operations, The Large Glass is placed in an aporetic spatiality,
which corresponds to the topology of the Bergsonian “present of multiple extensions.”
The event-delay of The Large Glass is not a representation but the construction of the
paradoxical vitality of the bride.

Circuit

“If our organs are natural instruments, our instruments must then be artificial organs”
[Bergson, Two Sources 298]. Bergson moves away from empiricism and idealism and
inaugurates an ontology of technical creativity: “The workman’s tool is the continua-
tion of his arm, the tool-equipment of humanity is therefore a continuation of its body”
[298]. Duchamp renounces “splashing paint on the canvas” and devotes himself to a “dry
conception of art” obtained with mechanical techniques: “I was beginning to appreciate
the value of the exactness, of precision, and the importance of chance. . . . A mechanical
drawing has no taste in it”23
Bergson’s artificial organs and Duchamp’s bride-engine occupy a hybrid space,
an epistemological territory marked by the continuity of bodies and machines. What is
relevant for both is the dysfunction of technology. The physical limitation of our body
“maintains in a virtual state anything likely to hamper the action by becoming real” [Two
Sources 303]. Hence, it is only when the body-machine falters that the confinement of
our lived space is broken, opening up a broader virtual territory, expanding the “structural
plan” of our species: “If these mechanisms get out of order, the door which they kept shut
opens a little way: there enters in something of a ‘without’ which may be a ‘beyond’”

21. Here I take up the supporting elements of Lyotard’s interpretation [Lyotard 87–97]. Craig
Adcock connects Duchamp’s charnière (hinge) to Girard Desargues’s studies on perspective; see
Adcock, “The Intersection of Art and Geometry.”
22. “There were discussions at the time of the fourth dimension and of non-Euclidean ge-
ometry. But most views were amateurish. Metzinger was particularly attracted. And for all our
misunderstandings through these new ideas we were helped to get away from the conventional way
of speaking—from our café and studio platitudes” [Writings 126].
23. Writings 130, 134. “Looking at the works of all three Duchamp brothers . . . James John-
son Sweeney noted that perhaps the only quality common in their works was that they were ‘in-
exact, but precise’” [Marquis, Marcel Duchamp 62]. The precision of intuition is a leitmotif of
Bergson’s philosophy; see in particular Bergson, “Philosophical Intuition.”

diacritics / winter 2008 87

[304]. The “conspicuous failure to function” of The Large Glass presupposes this dys-
functional positivity: “The Large Glass is an elaborate trip to nowhere: not only is the
erotic encounter between motorized bride and mechanical bachelor never consummated,
the apparatuses themselves have no rational program” [Joselit 112].
Like Bergson’s marriage of “mechanics and mysticism” [Two Sources 255–306],
Duchamp’s virtual machines have no connection with an ideological representation of
industrial mechanization. On the contrary, they grow on the nonhumanistic soil of tech-
nological vitalism. Neither Bergson nor Duchamp celebrates the myth of progress and
rationalization, or attacks reification from a critical perspective: the pathological behavior
of society, like a broken machinery, offers them an unprecedented chance of emancipa-
tion. In Bergson, capitalistic mechanization is an infirmity that reveals the power of our
“tool-making intelligence”; in Duchamp, the destructuring force of the readymade is the
logical conclusion that he draws “from the dehumanization of the work of art” [Writings
134].
In Matter and Memory, Bergson provides a description of the “electrical circuit” of
perception: “reflective perception is a circuit, in which all the elements, including the per-
ceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an electric circuit”
[104]. Finding itself immersed in a circuit whose polarities are the actual and the virtual,
each object belongs concurrently to the virtuality of memory and the actuality of percep-
tion. The mirrorical return accomplishes this movement of perception, as the operation
that couples every object in a circuit of reflective virtuality and readymade inertia. The
Large Glass is a twofold object, a thing already made and virtualized, a piece of reality
that has swallowed a mirror and splits itself up: high and low, bride and bachelors, desire
and necessity, freed temporality and geometric spatiality. The fundamental property of
the mirrorical return is the dissimilation of representation. “Each moment of life is split
up as and when it is posited” [Bergson, “Memory of the Present” 16]. The mirrorical
weakens our principle of reality.
The metaphysical machinery of Bergsonism bounces back in the anamorphic mir-
ror of The Large Glass. The virtual images of the bride appear like a repercussion of
the sudden arrest of the clumsy mechanical apparatus of the bachelors. The blocked-off
machination of the bachelors releases the sparks that shatter the actuality of the object, the
stripped virgin becomes a hung woman, the bride is abruptly undressed by the bachelors’
desire. “The bride basically is a motor. But before being a motor which transmits her
timid-power.—she is this very timid power” [Writings 42]. Immersed in the impotence of
the virtual, The Large Glass is “powerless as long as it remains without utility” [Matter
and Memory 140–41].
Being a machination and not a static mechanism, the (anti)artistic productivity of
The Large Glass is activated by the collision between the timidity of the virtual and the
cutting power of the actual. In between, the hinge is a caesura around which time is scat-
tered, a cracking that transforms the experiential temporality of the present into a formal
distribution of the unequal, resolving the dilemma faced by Duchamp upon his Futurist
debut: the static presentation of movement.

Machine

“Art—this is nothing more than a word to which nothing real any longer corresponds”
[Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art” 17]. Heidegger’s radical verdict on Western art’s
mission parallels Duchamp’s antiaesthetics. For both, the only legitimate function of art
is self-reduction to its conditions of existence,24 a task that must be accomplished through
24. “Reduce, reduce, reduce, was my thought” [Writings 124].

88
a genealogical inquiry into the technological essence of art. Thus, Duchamp conceives
the readymade as a “dehumanization of the work of art” obtained through the use of
mechanical techniques [Writings 134], and Heidegger establishes an equation between
technology and art, between art as the nontechnological ground of technology and tech-
nology as the worldly destiny of art.25
Like Duchamp, Heidegger regards experience as “the element in which art dies”
[“Origin of the Work of Art” 79]. Duchamp’s avant-gardism and Heidegger’s ontology
converge in the sublation of the stability of art’s epistemological province: sensible ap-
pearance. Yet the Heideggerian work of art, like a time machine, deploys a temporality
oriented toward a future epoch, while Duchamp’s readymade rests in quietist passivity.
Heidegger’s art-work is an inaugural center, the beginning of a world always already
instituted; Duchamp’s implosion of aesthetic norms overturns the exploding prophetism
of auratic art.
The readymade evicts the representational circuit of physicality and historicity and
orients art toward the anaesthetic; Heidegger’s work of art establishes a historical world,
transports “a people into its appointed task” [“Origin of the Work of Art” 77]. However,
both of these logics deprive the work of art of its Schein. What may be said about art are
“ironies of affirmation” [Writings 30] or prophetic enigmas. If art is an ontological conun-
drum, the task of interpretation “is to see the riddle” [Writings 79].
Following Hölderlin, Heidegger elaborates an ontology of the “mirror-play” that re-
formulates the speculative dialectic of self-reflection:26

Earth and sky, divinities and mortals—being at one with one another of their
own accord—belong together by way of the simpleness of the united fourfold.
Each of the four mirrors in its own way the presence of the others. Each there-
with reflects itself in its own way into its own, within the simpleness of the four.
This mirroring does not portray a likeness. The mirroring, lightening each of the
four, appropriates their own presencing into simple belonging to one another.
Mirroring in this appropriating-lightening way, each of the four plays to each
of the others. The appropriative mirroring sets each of the four free into its own,
but it binds these free ones into the simplicity of their essential being toward one
another. [“The Thing” 179]

25. “Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon
technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin
to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art”
[Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” 35].
26. Jacques Derrida has connected Heideggerian specularity to the methapysical implications
of Stephane Mallarmé’s lexicon of the mirrorical; see Derrida, “The Double Session.” Because of
Mallarmé’s influence on Duchamp, and also the numerous affinities between Bergson’s thought and
Mallarmé’s poetics, Derrida’s theory of specularity resonates with quasi-Duchampian overtones:
coupure, duplications, screenings, delays. Like The Large Glass, Derrida’s mirrors are “unusual,”
“germinal,”and “deforming.” Long citations from Heidegger’s “The Thing” and “Building Dwell-
ing Thinking” are introduced by Derrida in order to capture the hesitations of specularity and
sketch out an ontology of diverted reflection [Derrida, Dissemination 316]. Yet loyalty to Mallarmé
is counterbalanced by the Husserlian matrix that leads Derrida to a quasi-transcendental theory of
the speculative. Just as in Husserl the cut of transcendental reduction opens up the realm of con-
science, in Derrida a rupture in the mirror sustains the deconstruction of representative mimetism.
Derrida’s mirror “takes place”; apertures crack its neutral surface. The formal laws of reflection
and the empirical tain of the mirror are simultaneously accessible to a hyperphilosophical reflexiv-
ity: “The world comprehends the mirror which captures it and vice versa” [316]. For Duchamp’s
comments on Mallarmé’s poetics of “delay,” see Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp 40.

diacritics / winter 2008 89

Heidegger’s mirrors do not reflect things in symbols or symbols in concepts. The image
multiplies itself in the mirror-play of the “fourfold.” Likewise, Duchamp’s readymades
incorporate a mechanism that delays the self-constitution of the object without reflecting
a transcendent reality. Abandoning the work to the cuts and delays of the mirrorical, the
readymade constructs its topology by dissociating from itself. The art of Duchamp does
not disclose the “worldness of the world” (Heidegger) nor does it dissolve its presence
into a quasi-transcendental logic of self-reflexivity (Derrida). By delaying the objectual-
ity of the objects, Duchamp’s readymades conserve their impossibility and rest in their
hesitation.
Duchamp’s mirrorical needs neither an observer that compensates for the “stupidity”
of the specular gap nor a dialectical link of incorporation between thing and image. It
calls for the invention of an art of indifference that defeats the symbolic power of visual
representations. The Large Glass is the manifesto of an aesthetics without art and of an
ontology of the work as a movement of delay. Hence its constructive appearance and its
innocence: Duchamp does not need to excuse himself from the aesthetic tradition, as-
saulting it with obstinate dialectical overcomings (hermeneutics) or interminable mises
en abyme (deconstruction).27 Since Duchampian mirrors are machines, they abandon all
dialectics and embrace a constructivism of postponement: “The partition wall of a mirror
is a machine fed by the objects that are presented to it and that produces other objects, the
images that it reflects.”28
Given: 1° the Waterfall, 2° the Illuminating Gas, Duchamp’s last major project, sums
up his approach to art. Neither painting nor sculpture, it is simultaneously a machine
and delayed work. Delivered to posterity together with a sequence of notes in a manual
of instructions, the work’s existence is provocatively exposed to the sinful gaze of its
spectators, who must look through two peepholes in a weathered wooden door. Like a
seventeenth-century optical device, it is a “vision machine” [see Johnston], a receptacle
of carefully studied perceptive illusions and conceptual tricks.29 Diseased with Berg-
sonism, the art of Duchamp splits itself up. The fifty objects defined by Duchamp as
readymade are two-headed entities: “unhappy,” “reciprocal,” “rectified,” “aided,” “sick”
readymades.
Together with “readymade,” the enigmatic term used by Duchamp in order to illus-
trate his practice of art is inframince (infrathin).30 If the presence-to-itself of the work is
obstructed by the tricky delays of the readymades; if the immediacy of the readymades
is operated by separations that multiply their consistency, it is what happens in between
perceptions and words, kinesis (the narrative dynamism of The Large Glass), and immo-
bility (the crystallized images on the glass) that is selected by Duchamp as the elective
territory for its art. The infrathin is precisely this intermomentaneous terrain, a Bergso-
nian interval: “In the living mobility of things, the understanding is bent on marking real
and virtual stations. It notes departures and arrivals. It is more than human to grasp what
is happening in the interval” [Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics 77].

27. The transparence of The Large Glass gets around both the deconstructionist logic of tra-
scendentalization of presence and the speculative dialectic attributed by hermeneutics to specta-
torial subjectivity: “Following a usage that we can find in Hegel, we call what is common to the
metaphysical and the hermeneutical dialectic the ‘speculative element.’ The word ‘speculative’
here refers to the mirror relation. Being reflected involves a constant substitution of one thing for
another. . . . The mirror image is essentially connected with the actual sight of the thing through the
medium of the observer. It has no being of its own” [Gadamer, Truth and Method 465–66].
28. Lyotard 51. In The Logic of Sense, Deleuze has developed an overtly Bergsonian ontology
of mirroring.
29. On the Baroque genealogy of machine aesthetics see Carrouges; and Luisetti.
30. On the inframince, see in particular Duchamp’s last set of published notes, Notes, notes
1–46.

90
 No longer an epiphany of meaning, Duchamp’s works are an experimental labora-
tory for testing the paradoxes of immanence. Since their existence depends primarily
on operations of delay that penetrate the representational veil of everyday perception,
they initiate an emancipative topology of objectuality, a “more than human” art of the
in-between, immunized from the authority of the history of images. The readymades’
infrarepresentational intervals are the abyss that has altered all the categories, materials,
techniques, and objectives of art.

Translated by David Sharp

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