The genius of Marcel Duchamp perhaps consists, first, in having breached the gap separating particular ideas from general ones – already the mark of a great mind – and then in abandoning these distinctions in turn to anticipate what we might call particularized general ideas. In the same way, we must wonder whether Maurice Scève, addressing his ‘Délie,’ was singing of a specific woman, of the feminine ideal, or simply of ‘the idea’ (divorced from any female image), l’idée, of which Délie is the anagram. With accepted principles of knowledge and existence deliberately transgressed, the issue, for the first time with Duchamp, might have been ‘always or almost always to give the why of choice between two or several solutions (by ironic causality)’ – in other words, to introduce pleasure even into the formulation of the law to which reality must answer. (Examples: ‘a horizontal line, falling from a height of one yard onto a horizontal plane, curves at will and yields a new figure of the unity of length’; ‘by condescendance, a weight is heavier going down than going up’; bottles of fine spirits, such as Bénédictine, obey a ‘principle of oscillating density.’) In this resides what Duchamp has called ‘the irony of affirmation,’ in contrast to ‘negative irony, which depends solely on laughter.’ The irony of affirmation is to humour what fine-milled flour is to wheat. The miller in question – he who, at the end of the historical process tracing the development of dandyism, has agreed to act as ‘voluntary technician’ (to use Gabrielle Buffet’s term) – our friend Marcel Duchamp, is certainly the most intelligent and, for many, the most troublesome man of this first half of the twentieth century. The question of reality, in its relations to possibility – a question that remains the great source of anxiety – is here resolved with unmatched daring: ‘Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.’ There is no doubt that someone will eventually attempt a rigorous chronology of the innovations to which this method has led Marcel Duchamp in the visual domain, whose enumeration would far exceed the limits of the present introduction. The future can do no less than systematically retrace its path, than scrupulously describe its meanderings, in search of the hidden treasure that was Duchamp’s mind and, through it, in its rarest and most precious aspects, the mind of time itself. We are dealing here with a complete, in-depth initiation to the most modern ways of feeling, which take humour as their implicit condition.
After a meteoric passage through painting (Sad Young Man on a Train, Nude Descending a Staircase, The King and Queen Surrounded by Swift Nudes, The King and Queen Traversed by Swift Nudes, Virgin, The Passage from Virgin to Bride, The Bride), Duchamp, all the while devoting his energies from 1912 to 1923 to the ‘antimasterpiece’ that constitutes his seminal work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, signed, in protest against artistic indigence, seriousness, and vanity, a certain number of ‘readymade’ objects, dignified a priori by sole virtue of his choice: a coat rack, a comb, a bottle rack, bicycle wheels, a urinal, a snow shovel, etc. Before moving on to ‘reciprocal readymades’ (‘use a Rembrandt as an ironing board’), he continued along that path with ‘assisted readymades’: the Mona Lisa adorned with a moustache, a birdcage filled with cubes of white marble imitating sugar cubes across which lies a thermometer, etc.
The reader will enjoy finding on the following pages, alternating with some unpublished afterthoughts that are quite characteristic of his manner, a series of phrases made from words subjected to the ‘realm of coincidence’; phrases in which his readymade objects find their ideal complement; phrases that shine with the light of compacting, and that show in linguistic terms what one can expect from ‘canned chance,’ the great speciality of Marcel Duchamp.1
BIBLIOGRAPHY: La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, 1935.
BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp.
Strangles strangers.
Sacristy, crassity.
[Eglise, exil.]
We deliver domestic mosquitoes (half-stock).
[Nous livrons des moustiques domestiques (demi-stock).]
My niece is cold because my knees are cold.
Among our articles of lazy hardware we recommend a faucet which stops dripping when nobody is listening to it.
Have you already put the hilt of the foil in the quilt of the goil?
[Avez-vous déjà mis la moelle de l’épée dans le poil de l’aimée?]
Physics of luggage:
Calculate the difference between the volumes of air displaced by a clean shirt (ironed and folded) and by the same shirt when dirty.
Incest, or familial passion.
… An incesticide must sleep with his ‘relative’ before killing her; bugging required.
Adjustment of the coincidence of objects or parts of objects; the hierarchy of this kind of adjustment is in direct ratio to the ‘disparate.’
Oblong dress, exclusively designed for ladies suffering from the hiccups.
A full box of wooden matches is lighter than an opened box because it doesn’t make any noise.
Daily lady will dally with Daily Mail.
Should one react against the laziness of railway tracks between the passage of two trains?
Transformer intended to use up wasted bits of energy, such as:
excessive pressure on electric buzzers;
the exhalation of cigarette smoke;
the growing of hair, body hair, and nails;
the fall of urine and excrement;
movements of fear, astonishment, boredom, and anger;
laughter;
the dripping of tears;
demonstrative motions of the hands and feet, tics;
sour looks;
arms dropping to one’s side;
stretching, yawning, sneezing;
spitting normally and spitting blood;
vomiting;
ejaculating;
unwanted hair, tufts;
the sounds of nose-blowing and snoring;
fainting;
whistling, singing;
sighing, etc.
Anaemic cinema.
Abominable abdominal furs.
Litany of the scents:
I believe the tips of her breasts smell.
Shut up, the tips of your breasts smell.
Why do the tips of your breasts smell?
I’d like the tips of my breasts to smell.
Oh! do shit again! …
Oh! douche it again! …
Ruined, urined.
Litter erasure.
(translations by Ron Padgett, Elmer Peterson, Mark
Polizzotti, Roger Shattuck, and Trevor Winkfield)
1. As in the case of Jean-Pierre Brisset, many of Duchamp’s phrases are too dependent on specifically French assonance and homonymy to be rendered effectively into English. The following selection is an abridged version of Breton’s original, supplemented by a few related phrases (beginning with ‘Anaemic cinema’) that Breton did not include. [trans.]