The Gift of Violence

The answer to the riddle evoked by Duchamp’s last work must begin with the question: What is given in Given? The linkage of Given to freedom and truth—stemming from its connection to the Statue of Liberty—supports the transposition of this question to the phenomenological sphere. The locked garden, in which a female figure appears, is a metaphor for the Open space of truth as aletheia. The interplay of concealment and disclosure—typical of aletheia—is played out in the disturbing spectacle of a woman concealed by a wall and a door, and disclosed when peered at through two peepholes. The woman is not completely naked, since the invisible tissue of the fetish—at once the tissue of the flesh and a fabric—covers her like a veil. While adhering to the logic of the fetish, the work also disrupts it, for the tissue of the fetish does not conceal the woman’s bare genitals. Nevertheless, what appears in the work is not identical to real genitals, but rather falters between genitals and a wound. This Thing—be it genitals or a wound—is a delegate of the rav’s radical alterity, hosted in the work while eluding all understanding.