1. This account is based largely on Elisabeth A. Howe, Stages of Self: The Dramatic Monologues of Laforgue, Valéry and Mallarmé (Athens, Ohio, 1990).

2. For an interesting and persuasive affirmation of this point-from someone who was at times identified with a different position-see Claude Lévi-Strauss, "A Belated Word about the Creative Child," in The View from Afar , trans. Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (New York, 1985), 268-88. I discuss this essay and its place in Lévi-Strauss's views about individuality in "The Subjectivity of Structure: Individuality and Its Contradictions in Lévi-Strauss," in Rediscovering History: Culture, Politics, and the Psyche , ed. Michael S. Roth (Stanford, 1994).

3. William Seitz, "What's Happened to Art: An Interview with Marcel Duchamp," Vogue , February 15, 1963.

4. Duchamp made the remark to Lawrence Steefel; it has, of course, been repeatedly cited, for instance by Alice Marquis, Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 311.

5. Writings , 31-32.

6. Ibid., 77.

7. Ibid., 78. This may be an appropriate place to note that it was in relationship to this script that Duchamp employed the phrase "pictorial Nominalism," meaning by it that pictures would replace words, perhaps with the implication that these signs, unlike verbal ones, would not encourage people to believe in the real existence of abstract relations. Thierry de Duve has taken this phrase as the title of a book about Duchamp and erected it into a theory of avantgarde art based on the Lacanian notion that symbols cannot mediate our relationship to reality (that is, to the deep reality of the ça where we are inevitably divided from ourselves). Thus, Duchamp is supposed to have discovered that painting is impossible because it can create no generally meaningful relationship between the world and the human subject; in this situation every form of painting becomes simply an arbitrary claim to the name of painting, which it contests against every other one. This is not the place for a sustained critique of Duve's book, but among its problematic features are its positing of a wholly invented Oedipal relationship between Duchamp and Cézanne and its reading of the bride images as nonvirgins, in order to make them represent the canvas painted in opposition to the virginity of a blank canvas. See Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism .

8. See the letter quoted in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 278-79.

9. See Jacques Derrida, "Différance," in Margins of Philosophy , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1982); also Writing and Difference , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978).

10. David Lodge, Small World: An Academic Romance (New York, 1984, 1991), 31.

11. Barbara Johnson, "Introduction," in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination , trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, 1981), xvi.

12. See for instance George H. Bauer, "Duchamp's Ubiquitous Puns," and Dalia Judovitz, "Rendezvous with Marcel Duchamp: Given ," both in Kuenzli and Naumann, eds., Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century ; and davidantin, "Duchamp and Language" and ''The Romantic Adventures of an Adversative Rotarian or Alreadymadesomuchoff," collated by Lucy R. Lippard, both in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp .

13. Duchamp gave this account in, "Apropos of Myself," cited in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 273.

14. I discuss Jarry and his relationship to these currents in Bohemian Paris , 310ff., where the sources of these quotations are cited.

15. Cabanne, Dialogues , 48.

16. There is a photo of the bottom of the cage in Schwarz, Complete Works , 486.

17. Cabanne, Dialogues , 59.

18. From an unpublished interview with Harriet Janis, quoted in d'Harnoncourt and McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp , 295.

19. Cabanne, Dialogues , 16.

20. The text is reproduced in Ephemerides , May 13, 1960.

21. See especially the chapters on words and on advertising in Varnedoe and Gopnik, High and Low . I made a somewhat similar point in the conclusion to Bohemian Paris .

22. More will be said below about Duchamp's role in Arensberg's collection. For the catalogue of the Société Anonyme see the entries in Writings , 143-59. Alice Marquis points out that the three witnesses at his naturalization as a United States citizen in 1955 were directors of museums: Alfred Barr of MOMA, James Thrall Soby of the Yale Univeristy Art Gallery, and James Johnson Sweeney of the Guggenheim; Marcel Duchamp: Eros C'est la Vie , 311.

23. Cabanne, Dialogues , 72.

24. Quoted in Katherine Kuh, The Artist's Voice (New York, 1962), 89.

25. Erich Heller, "The Artist's Journey into the Interior: A Hegelian Prophecy and Its Fulfillment," in The Artist's Journey into the Interior and Other Essays (New York, 1965); most of the passages quoted occur between pages 134 and 136.

26. The poem is "The Bad Glazier," in Paris Spleen .

27. Cited by Richard D. Sonn in Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siècle France (Lincoln, Nebr., 1989), 224. Readers familiar with debates about modernism will see that such a view goes directly against the attempt by Peter Bürger to portray the avant-garde as the contrary and enemy of symbolist interiority. See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde , trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, 1984).