EXCERPT If, as Breton tells us, ‘Marcel Duchamp arrives more quickly than anyone else at the critical point of ideas’, it is because, to paraphrase Badiou, he never cedes the indetermination with which he short-circuits everything that might be understood as ‘genre/gender’ in art. As can be confirmed on the shortest of circuits—the one that Duchamp assembles between 3 Standard Stoppages [3 Stoppages étalon] (1913–14) and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–1923), along with the return effect of The Bride on the 3 Stoppages: a readymade expansion of the ‘standards’ laid out in a croquet case. In doing so, Duchamp enters into nothing less than a stunning [étourdissante] heterogenesis of himself in which he transforms into a Duchamp of the sign/of sex [Duchamp du signe/du sexe] via the swiftest of passages, one that leads from the principle of contradiction—taken to the letter of its abbreviated diction (is it not strangely resonant with the Freudian dictum that ‘the unconscious knows no negation’?) in order to elevate indetermination into the principle of a ‘cointelligence of contraries’ that unfolds by way of ‘infra-thin’ differences (the infrathin standing for a ‘cut’, ‘cuttage’, or ‘cuttation’ from the logical field of non-contradiction)—to the principle that there is no sexual relation. Duchamp’s wordplay around this ‘relation’ which logic necessarily cuts short, even, will be driven by an ‘ironism of affirmation’—affirming the there is no, but delinking it from its exclusively or univocally negative form by way of the play of ‘differences from negative ironism dependent solely on Laughter’. ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even’—not for nothing is the title itself a fine example of equivocation which invites speculation on the language in which it is spoken…