Comic as some of these distinctions sound, Duchamp took them quite seri-
ously: indeed, no two of his famous boxes, no two of his readymades or
scraps of paper are identical: for him, “ate” is not the same as “eat,” “table”
as “tables,” and “identity” a meaningless concept.
More than thirty years after Duchamp coined the term infrathin, the phi-
losopher Gilles Deleuze declared, “Modern life is such that, confronted with
the most mechanical, the most stereotypical repetitions, inside and outside
ourselves, we endlessly extract from them little differences, variations and
modi¤cations.” Those “little differences” are crucial in that:
I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon,
from an always decentred centre, from an always displaced periphery
which repeats and differenciates them. The task of modern philoso-
phy is to overcome the alternatives temporal/non-temporal, historical/
eternal and particular/universal.... Neither empirical particularities
nor abstract universal: a Cogito for a dissolved self.^17“But isn’t the same at least the same?” Wittgenstein asks sardonically in
proposition §215 of Philosophical Investigations, answering his own question
as follows:
We seem to have an infallible paradigm of identity in the identity of a
thing with itself. I feel like saying: “here at any rate there can’t be a
variety of interpretations. If you are seeing a thing you are seeing iden-
tity too.”
Then are two things the same when they are what one thing is? And
how am I to apply what the one thing shows me to the case of two
things?§216. “A thing is identical with itself.”—There is no ¤ner example of a
useless proposition, which yet is connected with a certain play of the
imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape
and saw that it ¤tted.^18In Duchamp’s words above, “2 forms cast in / the same mold (?) differ / from
each other / by an infra thin separative / amount.” The ordinary observer
may not notice this difference, which is perhaps best understood as the art-
ist’s domain. Deleuze cites the aesthetician Pius Servien as follows:
Introduction xxvii