Duchamp's Ego.pdf

Textual Practice 18 (2), 2004, 221–231

Jean-Michel Rabat´

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 opposing William Carlos William and Duchamp, 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 caf ´ 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 Biblioth`que Sainte Genevi`ve (let us imagine him sitting

on the seat by the window overlooking the Panth´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.

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 L´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 365–275 ), the founder of the sceptical

school, is limited, but there is one detail that may have triggered Duchamp’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 – or ‘theory’–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 well-

rehearsed 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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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 ‘in-

different’ ( a-diaphora ), ‘im-ponderable’ ( a-stathm ` 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. Philosophic-

ally, one may say with Marcel 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 – 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 in Duchamp’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 – the wheel. (In French, the phrase: ‘ Il n’a pas

invent´ 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 ﬂamboyant Marie D¨hnhard, 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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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’–in terms

that will curiously reappear in the ﬁrst lines of Marx’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 – or, in other words, isolated inwardness) are left.

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