The title of this seminar alludes to a formulation of Marcel Duchamp that he proposes in an interview with the curator, Katherine Kuh, from 1961. Responding to a question concerning why he was “so anxious to avoid the traditional,” Duchamp says:

Tradition is the great misleader because it’s too easy to follow what has already been done – even though you may think you’re giving it a kick. I was really trying to invent, instead of merely expressing myself. I was never interested in looking at myself in an aesthetic mirror. My intention was always to get away from myself, though I knew perfectly well that I was using myself. Call it a little game between “I” and “me.”

Note the emphasis. It comes after the dash. Tradition misleads, according to Duchamp, at the precise moment in which one believes that one is breaking with it, giving it a kick. There is no surer way of being traditional than believing in the artist’s power to break with it. An artist may break with a specific medium, painting for example as did Duchamp for instance, but this break is without teeth if it simply extends the range of artistic expression, if it does not break with expressive subjectivity itself. Art is not a matter of finding oneself, of looking at oneself, as Duchamp puts it, “in an aesthetic mirror.” It is an occasion for a peculiar form of self-abandonment, an effort to interrupt the expressive circuit between the “I” and “me.” Art, for Duchamp, ought not to confirm the subject’s relation to itself but unbind its identity. This is what he calls the “little game” between the “I” and the “me.”

This seminar will take its point of departure from this “little game.” At stake in this little game is something like the experience of modernity, as an experience of unmooring, of destitution, of dereliction, of pain and joy, of horror and hilarity. Duchamp posits art as a game played with and against the self in which something other is registered, a feeling of alterity that can be at once familiar and strange, like an apple painted by Cézanne. To think this gap in the self we shall have occasion to consider the work of Cézanne (and T.J. Clark’s recent book on Cezanne, If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present), Beckett (and Adorno’s approach to Beckett), and Duchamp (and Thierry de Duve’s psychoanalytic approach to him in Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade). 

With this material, we shall explore different ways of “playing” with this gap between the “I” and the “Me,” of mobilizing the desire to get rid of oneself, of destabilizing the ties that bind the subject to itself. In short, the seminar explores the way in which both the artist and the artwork are divided subjects.