EXCERPT Let us begin by drawing out a Duchamp-Thought as the underside of the Matissean field [du champ Matisséen] via a most paradoxical ‘Bergsonism’: in the sequence that leads him to 1912’s Nude Descending a Staircase, Duchamp will oppose a static energetics to the intensive energetics Matisse put to work in paintings and panels such as the Moscow Dance (1910), Interior with Aubergines, and The Red Studio (1911). Energetics exceeds dynamics—this is what the Matissean diagram attests to, on the plane of the forces it mobilises and quantifies, without its being reducible to a schema or translating them into forms in movement. In Matisse, then, energetics involves an intensive and expansive causality intrinsic to the relations between coloured surfaces—as opposed to dynamics, the external manifestation of energy through movement, which concerns effects and brings into play an abstract figuration or tracing of movement. Already in the Paris and Merion Dances, it is no longer properly speaking a matter of representing movement or forms in movement, but instead of investing every suggestion of movement, in its mobile continuity and its intensive indivisibility, as a vector of the energetic processuality of zones of colour. In order to champion the ‘in-the-making’ aspect of the processual, Matisse held back from any phenomenal motricity, from reestablishing any narrativity or gestural expressivity: in his work movements and gestures remain strangely suspended in their extension, so that the becoming of their forces can never be supplanted by a mere set of positions. The rhythmic decoordination of the dancers (their dys-positions) conditions the purely intensive activation of their movements, movements which then take on a status equivalent to that of the pure bands of colours alongside them—while at the same time playing upon a de-anthropomorphised ‘gesturality’ to produce a cold revival of energetics via the conjunction of heterogeneous elements (the Paris Dance). The energetic machining of forces-colours diagrammatised as the signs-forces of a deterritorialized dance thus becomes the primary motor of the intensive construction-expression that de-images painting, extract ing it from its composed interiority—putting it up against the wall…