EXCERPT Given that the arrhe of painting is feminine in gender, Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas…, the other side of the Large Glass, exists, insists, and consists in inscribing the world of (external) appearances within a bacheloric optical illusion by pushing to its crudest extremes ‘the retinal impression (and other sensory consequences)’ of a pornographic shop-window-displaying of a (feminine in gender) Nude fallen from her pedestal: a condemned woman, a con damné [damned cunt] in the form of a Mount Olympus? A new Olympia, in any case. So begins an act that is supplementary in all respects (the fourth act that no one saw coming). Given is not the hyperrealist image of the stripping-bare eluded in the Large Glass, but ‘the allegorical appearance’ of a pornoscopic assassination [mise à mort] executed in the hyperreal style of an overimage [surimage] that draws the gaze into a play of lures and trompe-l’oeil. So we cannot just say, with the voyeur whose words Lyotard imagines: ‘Given, nothing to be seen but a vulva, and for that reason nothing but an idiot [con] looking at it’, without detailing the trap into which he falls: ‘a idiot [con] is he who sees’ the cunt [con] of a ‘hussy’ (Monsieur Marcel’s word). For what Duchamp actually presents here is the fiercely unheimlich anti-anatomical gaping of an ‘erogeneous zone’ that the drive isolates, and which gives itself as the sheer fact of a cut and a partial trait…