At the end of the eighteenth century in England, Beau Brummell invented the ambivalent figure of the dandy, who would soon become tied to the advent of democratic society and of a new kind of spectator ever more greedy for sensations. At the start of the twentieth century, in the era of the masses, Marcel Duchamp renewed this figure of an unheroic resistance, an indifferent antisoldier who was elegant, distant, cold, highly constructed, and provocative, as well as inventive. He would also have to make of his entire being a work and to push the duty of incertitude to the point of transvestism. Especially in Rrose Sélavy, photographed by Man Ray at a time when mass society was manufacturing and spreading the most hackneyed stereotypes of men and women, Duchamp would make the transition from one sex to the other in images. The nineteenth century, to which he was still attached, had imagined unique figures of revolt against the deadlocked game of power being played out between the sexes. From Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs to Edgar Degas’ The Rape, we are not totally lacking in works that betray the violence of gender relations. In their wake, no doubt, Duchamp was both analyst and symptom, the one who saw things clearly and the same one who was struggling with the contradictions of his era.
For Duchamp, stating the terms of masculinity’s crisis boiled down no doubt to making the case against the alienated condition of women, but things were not so clear. They would be much clearer in the case of a Futurist like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who saw time itself as sexed, the past being feminine, the future combative and virile. He was not the only one at the time to think of woman as archaic and as a factor of degeneration, preferring the machine to natural organs. In the barracks of the European avant-garde, Duchamp was almost completely isolated; he fled the Great War, established new contacts in Francis Picabia and Arthur Cravan, and discovered, on American soil, a favorable audience in New York. Before that public, he experimented in an ongoing game, with his comet-shaped tonsure, adopting the position of an ascetic yet attractive monk and subscribing in this way to Baudelaire’s requirement that the dandy be seen at all times as sublime, saintly, and spiritual.
For Duchamp (who would have, up until today, many emulators), one must experience the abandonment of utopia in order to reinvent a super-critical position in art. To himself as permanent and detached work of art, he would add objects that extend that work by intensifying it and by giving it the longevity of the Museum piece and of the history of art. This he did with the readymade, among others. To the dehumanization of manufactured products, he responded with an indifference to good taste and to the pleasures of the eye. He abandoned painting, craft, emotion, and the eruptive manifestations of the body.
Giovanna Zapperi has just finished writing a remarkable thesis on the subject in which she lays out a personal vision of the profoundly ambiguous figure of Marcel Duchamp. Françoise Coblence, well known for her philosophical and psychoanalytical essays on art and for her pioneering history of dandyism, talks with her. And Julie Ramos, whose specialty is German Romanticism, in turn enters into the conversation.
If this discussion is still quite timely today, that is because the questions raised by Duchamp have entered into long-term history and have, after the end of heros (and of heroines), taken on the status of an unbounded truth in a consumerist society of the spectacle wherein the struggle between the will to power and the will to surrender goes on forever.

Laurence Bertrand Dorléac
Seminar of February 11th  2005

A type invented by George “Beau” Brummell in the final years of the eighteenth century that was turned into a literary character by such writers as Honoré de Balzac, Jules Barbey d’Aurévilly, and Charles Baudelaire, did the dandy still have a place in the twentieth century ? And if so, what changes did mass society make it undergo ? To these recurrent questions, Giovanna Zapperi offers a number of answers with the help of the figure of Marcel Duchamp.
As Alexandre Kojève wrote in 1969, “Brummell knew that, after Napoleon, one could no longer be a soldier.” Lord Byron, also comparing Brummell to Napoleon, stated that he would have preferred to be Brummell. In alluding to Duchamp’s celebrity with the help of testimony from Henri-Pierre Roché, who compared Duchamp’s celebrity to that of Napoleon and of Sarah Bernhardt, Zapperi is therefore situating herself straightaway, and is situating Duchamp, within the constellation of these stars, each of which dominated its own sky and fascinated people by their force of attraction. Pierre Cabane attributed to Roché the following words said to be spoken to Duchamp: “Your best work has been the employment of your time.” [ref]Marcel Duchamp, Entretiens avec Pierre Cabane (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1967), p. 135.[/ref] Duchamp is therefore a dandy on two different levels. If dandyism is to be described by the invention of one’s character, if its defining characteristic is to make of one’s person a work of art while extolling laziness and displaying a contempt for work, Duchamp really has that dandy impassivity, elegance, and inscrutability. Moreover, nonchalance does not exclude rigor; and Breton would underscore the systematic “method” of his inventions. [ref]André Breton, Anthologie de l’humour noir (Paris: J. J. Pauvert, 1966; Le livre de poche), p. 355.[/ref] Yet Duchamp also created an œuvre—a paradoxical one certainly, though innovative nonetheless. This trait indeed reinforces his dandyism, while at the same time distancing him from it. For, with the invention of the readymade, what triumphs is indifference to taste, along with the production of the already seen, impersonality and contempt for one’s “hand,” which is deemed to be overcharged with emotion. Duchamp carried out the dandy’s program, but he carried it out also through his work, his œuvre; and while this œuvre radicalizes the subject’s coldness and impersonality, it ceases to present them on the level of one’s character alone. Pursuing on this score the Baudelairean program, Duchamp transferred dandyism from one’s character to the work. This gesture, which had already been broached by Romanticism, constituted at one and the same time a loss and a sort of betrayal of Brummell’s radicality, which bet everything on his person but also guaranteed the generalization and permanency of the phenomenon. Dandyism could endure only if it were to be transformed, achieving at once its own loss as pure exhibition of the individual and its transition over to the work, its becoming something. That is why the readymade and Le Grand Verre, which Breton named an “anti-chef d’œuvre,” are his loveliest triumphs.
With Duchamp, it is no longer a question “of the burning need to make oneself into an original,” of “the pleasure of surprising others and the prideful satisfaction of never being surprised” as Baudelaire would have it, [ref]Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard-Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1976), vol. 2, p. 710.[/ref] but of introducing reproduction and repetition into the work. As Zapperi recalls, the readymade embodies the dandy’s dehumanization as well as the dehumanization of the capitalist mode of production. He carries out the program of the commonplace [poncif] and makes the commonplace his own. “Creating something commonplace is genius,” noted Baudelaire in Fusées. Benjamin offers the following comment:

“But to impress a trademark upon his work was Baudelaire’s avowed intention. . . . And perhaps, for Baudelaire, there is no higher honor than to have imitated, to have reproduced, with his work this state of affairs, one of the most profane of all in the commodity economy. Perhaps this is Baudelaire’s greatest achievement, and certainly it is one of which he is conscious: to have aged so quickly while remaining so durable.” [ref]Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (from the Tiedemann German edition) (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard, 2004), p. 372 (translation slightly altered). [Translator: As explained in note 3 on p. 967, le poncif is “the banal, the trite; a conventional piece of writing, a cliché. Baudelaire writes in his notebook: ‘To create a new place [poncif]—that is genius. I must create a new commonplace.’” My thanks to the historian of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group Stephen Hastings King for having located these Benjamin references for me in English.[/ref]

The commonplace—the trademark of modernity that testifies to the work’s inscription within time, to its solidity and its ageing—is even more characteristic of the readymade, Duchamp’s stroke of genius by which objects created entirely through the singular whim and arbitrariness of one’s choice are given distinction.
Yet it must be added, along with Zapperi, that Duchamp was able, as well, to embody dandyism in his character not only through his coldness, his nonchalance, and the originality of his clothing, but also through the exhibition of his person, the transformations he embodied, the transvestism he adopted, and the “spectacular femininity” he staged in the photos done by Man Ray, as well as through the play of sexual identity to which Rrose Sélavy bears witness.
In the nineteenth century, fashion [la mode] constituted, as Georg Simmel has written, all at once the imitation of a model, the need for a social support as well as a need for difference, and the tendency toward variation and distinction. [ref]Georg Simmel, “La mode,” Philosophie de la modernité (Paris: Payot, 1989), p. 168. [Translator: See the chapter on Fashion in Georg Simmel, On Individuality & Social Forms ; Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).][/ref] Women’s lack of social freedom drove them to take over this realm, so as to affirm their membership in a group as well as their individuality. It was the dandy who picked up on this strategy and diverted it for his own ends; it was he who then turned it into an essentially masculine path, thereby clouding the traditional social issues and confusing the division of genders.
The dandy, and Brummell first and foremost, in effect became the arbiter of masculine elegance, the genius of fashion, innovative, original, inimitable, and yet imitated, copied, and aped at every possible opportunity. Was Brummell for all that a star ? A diva, rather, a capricious and despotic one whose judgments, which were beyond appeal, were feared by everyone, the Regent of England above all others. From the diva, the dandy took the power of making a salon fashionable simply by his appearing there for a few minutes; he had the power to launch some unlikely fashion, like that of the tie so stiff that it prevented all movement, or, according to Barbey d’Aurévilly, that of the worn-out outfit. Yet with the star, Brummell shared the capacity to be in a position to create a myth. A star, wrote Malraux, “is a person capable of a minimum of theatrical talent whose face expresses, symbolizes, and embodies a collective moment.” And he mentioned in this respect the mythic Marlene Dietrich under the same heading as Phryne. The star is, according to Malraux, feminine, and, in the twentieth century, linked with the movies. She is the great actress who is capable of embodying different roles and capable of bringing scenarios to life and bringing them together. But as queens, courtesans, or spies, Garbo and Marlene fit into the tradition of the heros of pantomime: Pierrot as thief, drunkard, or lover. A man, too, can embody a myth, the perfect example of which was, for Malraux, Charlie Chaplin. For, as Malraux adds, “movies are aimed at the masses, and the masses love myth, for better or for worse.” [ref] André Malraux, “Esquisse d’une psychologie du cinéma” (1946), in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard-Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2004), vol. 4, pp. 14-15.[/ref]

While it is true that Brummell was a star, it was not his face, but the whole of his person, that embodied this quality. Yet the star is supposed to please the public, to be seductive, to figure as an object of desire. Now, the dandy, and no doubt Duchamp more than Brummell, did not seek to please people. He upset them; he loved bad taste and indulged in the aristocratic pleasure of not being liked. His sense of humor was purposefully caustic, and his spirit, unlike that of most stars, was blistering. When Baudelaire demanded that the dandy live and sleep in front of a mirror, that he be forever sublime, [ref]Charles Baudelaire, “Mon cœur mis à nu,” Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 678[/ref] he was laying out an ideal of sainthood, an ascetic rule he assigned to the dandy through which the latter would, for him, “border on Spiritualism and Stoicism.” [ref]Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” p. 710.[/ref] We are therefore far from the idea of a media image. As for Marcel Duchamp—who, according to Breton, had arrived “at the end of the whole historical process of the development of dandyism”—he was “surely the most intelligent and (for many) the most annoying man of this first part of the twentieth century.”[ref]André Breton, ibid.[/ref] Quite far from himself being a star, Duchamp was able to play at stardom. He denounced the stereotypes of the star in mass society—those of the femme fatale, but also those of the “culture industry” or of culture: Mona Lisa is a star, but L.H.O.O.Q. [ref]Translator’s Note: Apropos of Duchamp’s assisted readymade with the French title La Jaconde aux Moustaches. L.H.O.O.Q (Mona Lisa with Mustache and Beard), Kristina Seekamp, on her website Unmaking the Museum: Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades in Context explains, “The title is essentially a phonetic game. As Duchamp himself noted in a 1966 interview, ‘I really like this kind of game, because I find that you can do a lot of them. By simply reading the letters in French, even in any language, some astonishing things happen’ (Cabanne 63). When read quickly in French, the title L.H.O.O.Q. sounds like a sentence translating to ‘She has a hot bum/ass.’ This is the most commonly [c]ited meaning of the phrase, but many other ideas also surround this intriguing group of letters. Duchamp gave a ‘loose’ translation of L.H.O.O.Q. as ‘there is fire down below’ in a late interview (Schwarz 203). Steefel points out that, when spoken in English, L.H.O.O.Q. sounds like ‘LOOK’ (50). Thus the piece could have a further function as a commentary on the relationship between artist and viewer, which Duchamp was admittedly very interested in.’ (‘Laugh’ 111)” http://arthist.binghamton.edu/duchamp/LHOOQ.html.[/ref] She enters into the circulation of capital; she has to be able to be given a mustache, sold, and exchanged. In this sense, like the dandy of the nineteenth century, Duchamp questioned the art and culture of his time by presenting figures that radicalized the questions about them. Like the dandy, Duchamp poked fun at the Romantic genius and his pseudo-inspiration. He extolled artificiality, indifference, impassiveness, the reign of an ironic causality that prevents any recognition of identity. When originality is “adapted to the market,”[ref]Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 333 (translation altered).[/ref] genius can give itself out only as commonplace. Baudelaire was the first to have this idea. Duchamp made it into a reality. Thus would Duchamp finish up as well as finish off dandyism.

Françoise Coblence is a professor of aesthetics at the Jules Verne University of Picardie and head of the Jules Verne University of Picardie’s Center for Research in the Arts. She has published Le Dandysme, obligation d’incertitude (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), Freud 1886-1897 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), Les Attraits du visible (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005), as well as articles on Baudelaire and dandyism, Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas (in particular in the Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse), and edited Les Fables du visible et l’esthétique fictionnelle de Gilbert Lascault (Brussels: La Lettre volée, 2003). Her current work bears on the articulation between aesthetics and psychoanalysis, especially around the question of empathy.