Between images and fromages: Lyotard on Painting’s Critical Force

• Authors: Schollenberger Piotr
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

In this essay I want to focus on Jean-François Lyotard’s interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s “The Large Glass” which I confront with Duchamp’s idea of pictorial nominalism. I invoke the main thesis from Lyotard’s important essay “Freud selon Cézanne,” to draw a line between Lyotard’s analysis of artistic experience of space in Cézanne’s work and the topological conceptuality traced by Lyotard in spatial relations within Duchamp’s “The Large Glass.” I want to show that the concept of “transformation” that is introduced in Lyotard’s interpretation of Duchamp’s works, operates within certain spatial analysis which lays the foundations for philosophical analysis in situ, or, as Lyotard writes, “topological politics.” For Lyotard this is the exact context to proceed the meditation of transformational potential hidden within the idea of presentation and representation of the space that becomes visible when one starts to notice incongruences as well as congruences.

Keywords

EN

Lyotard; Duchamp; discourse; figurative; figural; painting

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Warszawski
• Journal: Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 3
• Issue: 4(10)
• Pages: 32-43

Dates

published

2019-12-31

Contributors

author

Schollenberger Piotr

• Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw

References

• Belting, Hans. Looking through Duchamp’s Door: Art and Perspective in the Work of Duchamp, Sugimoto, Jeff Wall. Translated by Steven Lindberg. Köln: Verlag der Buchland Walther König, 2009.
• Benjamin, Andrew. Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203981450.
• Bennington, Geoffrey. Lyotard: Writing the Event. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
• Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA; London, England: The MIT Press, 1999.
• Dalrymple Henderson, Linda. The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press, 2013.
• Dalrymple Henderson, Linda. Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the “Large Glass” and Related Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
• De Duve, Thierry. Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade. Translated by Dana Polan. Oxford, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1991.
• Duchamp, Marcel. Duchamp du signe: Ecrits. Edited by Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. Paris: Flammarion, 1975.
• Duchamp, Marcel. Notes. Paris: Flammarion, 2008.
• Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. New York, Kansas City: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1968.
• Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Hackett Publishing Company, 2013.
• Jay, Martin. “Magical Nominalism: Photography and the Re-enchantement of the World.” Culture, Theory & Critique 50, no. 2-3 (2009): 165-183. https://doi.org/10.1080/14735780903240117.
• Krauss, Rosalind E. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press, 1994.
• Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. Discourse, Figure. Translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. “Freud selon Cézanne.” In Des dispositifs pulsionnels. Paris: Galilée, 1994.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. Phenomenology. Translated by Brian Beakley. New York: State University of New York Press, 1991.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. “Something Like Communication without Communication.” In The Inhuman. Reflections on Time. Translated by Geoffrey Bennigton and Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. Les Transformateurs Duchamp / Duchamp’s TRANS/formers. Translated by Ian McLeod. Edited by Herman Parret. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008.
• Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing. Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Translated by Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.7312/mala14524.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” Translated by Carleton Dallery. In The Primacy of Perception. Edited by James. M. Edie, 159-190. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.
• Mitchell, W.J.T. “What is an Image?” New Literary History 15, no. 3 (Spring, 1984): 503-537. https://doi.org/10.2307/468718.
• Panofsky, Ervin. Perspective as a Symbolic Form. Translated by Christopher S. Wood. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
• Rajchman, John. “Jean-François Lyotard’s Underground Aesthetics.” October 86 (Fall 1998): 3-18. https://doi.org/10.2307/779104.
• Readings, Bill, Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. London: Routledge, 1991.
• Sanouillet, Michael, and Elmer Peterson eds. Salt Seller: The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1975.

Identifiers

DOI

10.14394/eidos.jpc.2019.0040