– Marcel Duchamp’s drawing, the only one in the accompanying notes for the Large Glass, in Box of 1914, entitled To Have the Apprentice in the Sun, on musical manuscript, and duly signed, Marcel Duchamp, 1914
Anarchy is the bomb, or the comprehension of technology. Jarry puts forward a curious conception of anarchism: “Anarchy Is,” but it makes Being lower itself to the being of science and technology (Ubu himself will become an anarchist in order better to ensure that he is obeyed). More generally, Jarry’s entire oeuvre ceaselessly invokes science and technology; it is populated with machines and places itself under the sign of the Bicycle. The bicycle is not a simple machine, but the simple model of a Machine appropriate to the times. And it is the Bicycle that transforms Passion, as the Christian metaphysics of the death of God, into an eminently technical relay race. The Bicycle, with its chain and its gears, is the essence of technology: it envelops and develops, it brings about the great Turning of the earth. The bicycle is the frame, like Heidegger’s “fourfold.”
– Gilles Deleuze, “An Unrecognised Precursor to Heidegger,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D.W. Smith and M.A. Greco, Uni. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997, p. 93
Leave a Reply