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false. It is generous and still hopes. It defends freedom, or rather, liberties, in

the plural; but these are the illusory liberties we grant ourselves when we be-
lieve that anything is permitted. This would be just, perhaps, but it is not true.
The truth is that everything should be permitted. Liberties are relative but free-
dom ought to be absolute. The readymade is pluralist—a plurality of them
exists—but it must speak universally. An indifferent object is never really in-
different but it must claim to be so, absolutely. And the "do whatever" is never
unconditional but it ought to be. To the universality of exchange—the law of
reality—one must oppose the silent and incomprehensible law of necessity,
which is also the necessity of the law. The imperative "do whatever" is a cate-
gorical imperative.

THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE OF M O D E R N ART

Here, against the wall of the categorical imperative, the interpretation of the
whatever stops for the time being. From the readymade's "profanation," I have
drawn the permission to judge it indifferent. But nothing authorized me to
judge it absolutely indifferent. Nothing authorized me to, but everything
obliged me, and everything still obliges us to do so. I would even add that this
obligation is the requirement of "the everything," of totality, but of a totality
that is not Hegelian. What is at stake, of course, is the law's universality, and,
since we are talking about art, it is art's universality. In the Foundations of the
Metaphysics of Morals, Kant gives several formulations of the categorical impera-
tive. The first is:

For since the imperative contains besides the law only the necessity
that the maxim should accord with this law, while the law contains
no condition to which it is restricted, there is nothing remaining
in it except the universality of law as such to which the maxim of
the action should conform; and in effect this conformity alone is
represented as necessary by the imperative. There is, therefore, only
one categorical imperative. It is: Act only according to that maxim

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by which you can at the same time will that it should become a
universal law.9

To the extent that artists abide by the compelling injunction to do what-

ever, received from no one knows whom, perhaps from what Kandinsky called
inner necessity, they also avail themselves of the authorization to it. They relay
the command, u you must," with "I want." In Kantian terms: to do whatever
is the maxim of their will. Earlier, we asked the following question: how obey
the injunction if the injunction doesn't say? Well, I do what I want, the maxim
answers, I do whatever. Delivered over to its sole authorization, the maxim is
merely liberal or anarchist. It fails to be necessary, lacking the inner or outer,
immanent or transcendent (no one knows) necessity that obliges artists, and
through which they can will the universality of their art. Do what you want,
yes, do whatever freely, but do it so as to convey, through the maxim that you
give yourself, the feeling that you obey an injunction which you have received,
and that it is this injunction which compels you to will that your maxim should
become a universal law. The maxim of the whatever is legal only if it is willed
for whomever. This is the first side of the modern imperative, its generous and
Utopian side, that which admonished Kandinsky, for example, to anchor to the
maxim of abstraction the foundation of a universal pictorial language speakable
by anyone. I could multiply examples; they are all instances of a democratic,
universalist ideal inherited from the Enlightenment: the functionalist ideal, from
the Werkbund to the Athens Charter; the Dada ideal of liberation; the revolu-
tionary ideal of surrealism; the ideal of the Whitmanesque ego of the American
Abstract expressionists; the ideal of spectator participation in the sixties, from
Fluxus to kinetic art; and finally, as one would expect, in May '68, the ideal of
power to the imagination. That is the side of hope, but it is also that of disap-
pointed hopes. None of these ideals has kept its promises; on this side only

9 Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (New
York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), p. 44

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disenchantment is left. The other side of the modern imperative never promised
enchantment. It only proclaimed terror. How obey the injunction if the injunc-
tion doesn't say? Well, I do what I want, the maxim answers, and whatever I
do, whatever I want, I obey. My violence is legitimate and my will is pure. But
the more violent I am in my will for freedom, the more I am hostage to my
violence. Is there a free individual who can freely give himself such a maxim
without soon feeling terrorized by the injunction of terrorism with which his
maxim invests him? Delivered over to its sole radicality, the maxim is merely
necessary, but of that blind and irresponsible necessity that produces happen-
stance crimes to which all are hostage, their authors as well as their victims. It
lacks freedom, the freedom, that is, to disobey. And that is what the whatever,
as maxim that obliges and authorizes all at once, prohibits. But it is also what
the whatever, as categorical imperative, prohibits being prohibited.
Once I receive the order to do whatever, I receive it as a "you must," which
addresses me—that's beyond doubt—but which does not address itself to me,
or to a me. It falls on me. As long as I haven't made it the maxim of my will, I
remain a you, I am not yet authorized to say "me/' or "I will." (In other words,
I shall never be the author of the law, only of my maxim.) It is at the most
intimate point of this you who is not me that the duty of freedom is lodged: I
ought to have the possibility of not endorsing the imperative of the whatever
and of not making it my maxim. And it is at that same intimate point—between
the you who is the recipient of the law and the voluntary I of my maxim—that
the order of disobeying is conveyed to me: don't do whatever. Needless to say,
between this you and this I there is nothing like space, not even the space of a
speech act; between the "moment" when I receive the categorical imperative
and the "moment" when I make it my maxim there is no time that passes, not
even the time of making a decision. For it is as much through the maxim I give
myself that I receive the imperative and at the same time—Kant says—that I can
will that my maxim become a universal law. We have there, quasi outside space
and time, a philosopheme that is the exact equivalent of the above paradox
which, within time and space, held that there was a history of the whatever.
On the one hand, it is indeed impossible to disobey the modern imperative.

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Whatever the modern artist does—the one, I remind you, who feels summoned
by the duty of doing whatever—he or she authorizes him- or herself as well
and always obeys his or her maxim. The dadaists limited themselves to this
authorization, and it is obviously in large part from the feeling that that was too
easy that the escalation of the artistic whatever began. But on the other hand,
it is just as impossible to obey the modern imperative without resistance. What-
ever artists want to do, including the anything whatever—a work made by
chance, say—they have do to something. In other words, they can't do every-
thing; their fmitude prohibits this. The art historians-interpreters of Dada lim-
ited themselves to this resistance, and it is largely because it is so obvious that
they didn't take the whatever seriously. Blinded by so much obviousness, nei-
ther the dadaists nor their interpreters perceived the necessity of the whatever
insofar as it is simultaneously impossible to obey it without getting caught up
in terror and escalation and to disobey it without taking the initiative of what
must be called, after the fact, a tradition. Or, more radically: neither perceived
that it is impossible to obey and disobey the imperative of the whatever freely
without having to say, categorically, that to do anything whatever is impossible.
As I said, what is at stake is the universality of the law, the universality of
art, the universality of the categorical imperative do whatever. It is understood
that the Kantian categorical imperative is not the law of someone and that it
gives no one the right to institute his or her personal maxim as a universal rule.
To the contrary, that's the only thing it proscribes. It is understood as well that
the Kantian categorical imperative states no content of the law but that it pre-
scribes the conformity of the maxim to the universality of a law in general. As
Jean-Luc Nancy says, "The law prescribes legislating according to the form of
the law, that is, according to the universal form. But," he adds, "universality is
not given."10 If, as I hold, do whatever is rightly a categorical imperative, then
we must go further and say that the universal is impossible, or that impossibility
is, today, the modality of the universal.

10 Jean-Luc Nancy, L'imperatif categorique (Paris Flammarion, 1983), p 24

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The phrase do whatever doesn't give the content of the law, only the content
of the maxim. Moreover, this content is any content whatever and becomes
determined only by the action that puts the maxim into practice. Do whatever
prescribes nothing determined. It only prescribes a form conformant to the
universal, in the radical and final condition of finitude. And that means: con-
formant to the impossible. Do whatever; but you can't do everything; then do
something that will conform to anything whatever, to a thing in general, better
still, to the thing, extended to its infinite and indefinite universality; do some-
thing impossible. Duchamp chose things, whatever, a urinal for example. Once
chosen, this thing is forever fatally and excessively overdetermined. It is impos-
sible to choose anything whatever while avoiding that it be this thing by the
same token. It is impossible to judge whatever, or the whatever, while judging.
It is impossible to make, universally. Thus Duchamp, with a pun, defined ge-
nius: as the impossibility of the making. 11 And indeed this is the genius of mod-
ern art, its Witz but also its law. It is impossible that something, this or that,
should conform to the thing-in-general.
I said earlier on that with Duchamp's readymade, the absolute whatever
happened to the history of art. Now, it is not as a result of the things chosen by
Duchamp that we have to say that the readymade amounts to absolutely anything
whatever, or that it is absolutely indifferent. The readymades are not indifferent
at all, and the urinal, for example, is not at all just any thing. Its choice was
decisive of the thing and determined it. But Duchamp's maxim of choice was
decisive of the choice and it undetermined it: "A point which I want very much
to establish is that the choice of these 'readymades' was never dictated by es-
thetic delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference
with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste . . . in fact a complete
anesthesia."12 Anesthesia, visual indifference, better, the freedom of indifference,

11 " ' W h a t is genius?' Marcel reads his reply ' T h e impossibility of the iron [1'impossibilite
du fer].' And he adds: 'Another pun, of c o u r s e . ' " Denis de R o u g e m o n t , "Marcel D u c h a m p ,
mine de rien," p 45 See chapter 3.
12. 5 5 , p. 141.

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specify the maxim of the choice of a readymade. 13 However, it is not yet by

virtue of the maxim, of indifference as a subjective attitude, that we must say
that the readymade amounts to absolutely anything whatever. The maxim of
choice presents the chosen thing as a specimen drawn from a totality unpresent-
able as such due to the fact of finitude. It presents it as an example chosen so as
to be exemplary of a choice that would convey the whatever as such. Insofar as
it is exemplary, the urinal Duchamp chose stands for any urinal whatever, but
only relatively: he could have chosen another one drawn from a series that is
only virtually infinite. Insofar as it also stands for any industrially produced
good, this urinal also reads as a symbol of any thing whatever, but it would still
be relatively. What forces us to say that the readymade (not the urinal) amounts
to the absolute whatever is that through the maxim according to which Du-
champ chose the urinal, according to which he judged, he was able—and with
him the uninitiated spectator whose judgment he anticipated—to will that the
whatever become at once a universal law: art, what one universally calls art,
must be whatever and be named as art by whomever. This is the modern imper-
ative stripped bare, the one all those artists obeyed—yet without interpreting it
correctly—who gave their art an ultimate purpose set against the universalist
horizon of the modern Utopia par excellence: we will all be artists some day.
And it's the same imperative followed by all those artists who—without inter-
preting it any better—conditioned their practice according to the universalist

13. T h e expression freedom of indifference is put forth in a note o n the "poids a trous" in the
Large Glass (SS, p. 62), but the context allows it to be interpreted in the framework of the
problematic of choice, whose D u c h a m p i a n formula is: "Free will = Buridan's ass" Paul Janet's
Traite elementaire de philosophic, w h i c h was current in French high schools during Duchamp's
youth, contained a discussion of the dilemma of Buridan's ass under the heading "Liberte
d'indifference." This indicates that w h e n D u c h a m p makes free will, which is no more than
the condition for moral freedom, into the maxi m "freedom of indirTerence"—a move that
indicates that he is making a reflexive use of i t — h e understands that it is no m o r e than the
formula for authorization (for the author, the " m e " ) , and not yet the s u m m o n i n g by
the categorical imperative which, according to Kant, both proves and requires moral freedom

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postulate of the modern myth par excellence: we are all artists already. No won-
der Joseph Beuys incarnates the end of modernity: both roads—"do whatever,
in order to" and "do whatever, provided," lead to him, to both the myth and
the Utopia of creativity. Creativity was this faculty of making art supposedly
shared by all human beings, and which education, social, economic, or cultural
progress would some day unleash as the perfect conflation of taste and genius.14
But Duchamp outstripped the moderns. He didn't believe in creativity; and he
didn't aim for it either. That the passer-by has "taste" and even "genius" is
nothing but a formal requirement of the categorical imperative of the whatever.
In the matter of taste: the freedom of indifference. So much for the maxim. In
the matter of genius: the impossibility of the making. So much for the law. A
priori, art ought to be whatever and be called art by whomever, but the mod-
ality of this ought, of this subjective necessity, which remains exemplary like that
which Kant required for the judgment of taste, takes the route of a negative
necessity, of an impossibility.15 So, creativity is no longer a Utopian program in
the form of a maxim, or a mythic belief in the form of a presupposition, it is
an impossible imperative in the form of a conformity to itself, and such is the
supremely ironic law of the readymade. It not only boxes the thing into the
overdetermined double bind of having to be at once something and anything
whatever (which is nonetheless empirically the case), it not only opens the thing
to its undetermined virtuality, only exemplary—or symbolic, as Kant would
have said—of standing for whatever (which remains transcendentally required),
it also abandons the thing to its absolute impossibility of being determined as
undetermined, that is, to its impossibility of conforming to the law or the neces-

14. See chapter 5.

15. In chapter 3 , I have interpreted the "impossibility of the i r o n / o f the m a k i n g " as a mere
feeling, but also, as a mandatory one, as the quasi-moral feeling that any painter sensitive to
the historical conditions that have made painting useless must feel It is obviously with the
passage from the specific to the generic, from painting to art, that this subjective sense of
moral obligation entails as its objective counterpart the logical, even technical, impossibility
of making something—anything-—that would not be this thing

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sity of a universal whatever. And it's precisely thanks to this abandonment that
the readymade—and not the readymades—conforms to the universal of this im-
possibility. In other terms, that the phrase "this is art," as it can be applied to
anything, ought to be applied to a "this" that is absolutely, or better, categori-
cally, anything whatever.

Do WHATEVER SO T H A T . .

Here, finally, is a third interpretation of the modern imperative: do whatever,

so that . . . To go right to the essentials of a philosophy of art having categori-
cally given up naming the essential, I would say, with a rather poor pun: once
there is no more ontology you need a deontology. Or better, since under
different light all of the following amounts to the same thing: when we no
longer dare, or can, or know how to postulate or to will the universal, when
the names Kant gave it, names like the Supreme Being, the Sovereign Good,
the Supersensible, the sensus communis or even the Idea of humanity, are, for
many philosophers today, in danger of being so many Schwdrmereien for which
we are in a state of mourning, then universality itself is what we must decide
about in each singular instance. A superhuman philosophical and political task
that possibly drove Nietzsche mad, it is also happily a human, all too human,
task to which what we persist in calling art offers the basis for a practice having
the symbolic value of warning. When, from inside this empirical domain—
which as such doesn't need to stake a claim to universality, only to culture—the
universality of art has become its impossibility and its impossibility nonetheless
remains prescribed as a duty vis-a-vis universality, then art as a whole must be
judged case by case. When it is more than doubtful that there exists in every
man and woman on earth a universal faculty of taste and—even more doubt-
ful—a universal conflation of taste with genius, then we must hold on to the
built-in claim to universality of the sentence "this is art" in full consciousness of
its impossibility to realize itself in society and in history. When the postmodern
is also the posthistorical, when the presupposition or the postulate of his-
tory's direction is categorically abandoned for having been all too materialized

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as systemic or totalitarian menace, then history's direction must be decided here

and now, locally and in what Walter Benjamin called "the instant of peril" Hie
et nunc, but also ad hoc: judiciously and with "there" in view 16
The angel of history marches into the historical wind facing backwards. Its
gaze is retrospective in a way that is not dialectical; it is not turned toward the
past so as to predict the future. It judges the past in the imperative urgency of
the present moment and without knowing what awaits it. Whence the infinite
melancholy of the one who lives with the feeling of permanent catastrophe.
The angel of history judges the past and communicates the duty to reinterpret
it to the historian or the "archaeologist." It is this duty, and it alone, that I would
like to call postmodern. It is modern at the same time, not because modernity is
an unfinished project, as Habermas thinks—it is perhaps not finished but it is
no longer a project—but because modernity must be guarded; not even safe-
guarded—in order to be reinterpreted, it will have to be violated—but
guarded. We are the guardians of the modern tradition, a tradition to be at once
translated and betrayed, as the proverb, traduttore traditore, says. Here are some
of this reinterpretation's outlines.
(1) Modern art, at least those works that have made the modernity of mod-
ern art and of which Duchamp's readymade is exemplary in every way, has not
been an autotelic activity folding its end upon its means. Neither art-for-art's-
sake, nor art as art, nor art about art, does justice to what has happened. The
purism and "formalism" of a large part of modern art have been the manifesta-
tions of a purely formal conformity to purposiveness, the very one that Kant
called the "purposiveness without purpose" of aesthetic judgment. (2) The best
works of modern art have not for that matter been subjected to external pur-
poses, be they revolutionary in the sense of a redemptive social violence. They
have not been the means or the mediums of a revolutionary program or ideol-
ogy that would have justified them. They have been the manifesto of a revolu-

16. Walter Benjamin, "Theses o n the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, trans. Harry
Z o h n ( N e w York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 263.

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tion—that, granted—the pure manifestation of this "sovereign" violence,

neither means nor end, of which Benjamin had begun the conceptual elabora-
tion.17 (3) Modernism has not been the laboratory in which the necessary and
sufficient conditions of art were tested by progressive elimination. It has not
been a reductionist practice and it has not issued into essential conventions. It
has been a tradition—that, granted—often inspired by the idea of an essence
of art, but a tradition that never ceased judging this idea, here and there, in
contingent historical circumstances, without determining criteria. (4) The era
in which we live has not leveled all styles or made all avant-gardes interchange-
able with each other under the universal law of the commodity. The marketing
of the trans avant-garde will not last. The rampant pluralism of the artworld is
only the fear of judgment and its opportunism a lack of integrity. But ours is a
time of peril in which, not by accident, practices are summoned up from the
past, some to maintain repression, others to testify as symptoms, others still to
re-judge.
The categorical imperative is the imperative of judgment. To make art is
to judge art, to decide, to choose. "Making something," said Duchamp, "is
choosing a tube of blue, a tube of red, putting some of it on the palette, and
always choosing the quality of the blue, the quality of the red, and always
choosing the place to put it on the canvas, it's always choosing. . . . Choice is
the main thing, even in normal painting." 18 The categorical imperative enjoins
the modern artist to choose in the absence of criteria not because artistic criteria
no longer exist and because in our era of "moral dissipation" art has foundered
in the laxity of the whatever, but because the criteria, norms, and conventions

17. In "Critique of Violence" (Walter Benjamin, Reflections, trans E d m u n d Jephcott [ N e w

York: Schocken Books, 1986], 277-300), an extraordinary rich and dense text that remains
enigmatic in many ways This text today asks to be reread and projected into its own intertex-
tual network, w h e r e Kant is discreetly played off against Hegel or Marx, and also where Sorel
is played off against Kant and Nietzsche against himself.
18 Marcel D u c h a m p , interview by Georges Charbonnier, radio interviews, RTF, 1961 (my
translation).

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that structure the practice of one artist are for another artist but someone else's
maxim. And no maxim can be instituted as a universal law. However, this
doesn't prevent maxims—norms, criteria, styles, if you prefer—from being
transmitted from one artist to another, from one group to another, or from one
era to another. It's what is called influence on the individual level and tradition
on the collective one. But influence is a causal concept that is incapable of
explaining the evolution of art without postulating ruptures of influence that
are always very visible at the moment but fade with distance. And since it is
solely interpretive whereas it should be evaluative, what this concept fails to
take into account is that when a maxim is transmitted it is also rejudged. The
concept of influence should be banished from the vocabulary of art history. As
for that of tradition, it should on the contrary be kept, in both senses of the
term: it should be preserved and it should be guarded, as should the modern
tradition itself For there is a tradition of the whatever, and it's neither the tradi-
tion of the anti-tradition nor the tradition of the new. We have been long
warned about the massive failure of the first, since futurism, to be precise. When
artists receive the imperative of the whatever as given ultimate purpose by the
future, they also receive it as a command to make a tabula rasa of the past. This
started with the slogan about burning the museums and ended in an apology
for total war. Perhaps Fascism and Nazism were the Gesamtkunstwerk of a Hege-
lian vision of history where the whatever replaced the Absolute Spirit. The
paradoxical lesson of this tragic history, if one can draw a lesson from it, is that
the politicization of art is not the response to the aestheticization of politics.
When Benjamin wrote that, Auschwitz was still a futurist prognosis and his
own melancholy had not yet driven him to suicide.19 This lesson, if there is one,

19. I certainly don't want to overlook the dramatic circumstances that provoked Benjamin's
suicide at the Franco-Spanish border in September of 1940 But it in n o way detracts from
the exemplary historical character of this suicide to remark—as Gershom Scholem has m o r e -
over {Walter Benjamin The History of a Friendship [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1981])—that Benjamin was tempted by suicide well before To the contrary, we

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is that like the word tradition the word art as well must be kept—no doubt less
for its impossible universality than for its specific fimtude of being only one
social practice among others—if one wants to avoid coming, or returning, to
total war considered as one of the fine arts.
No more than an anti-tradition, that of the whatever was not a tradition
of the new. From Baudelaire to Rosenberg the new was just one of the maxims
of modernism, conforming to only one of the two aspects of its imperative,
which also prescribed that it be disobeyed: be new, but be classical too, be
classical in being new. It has been some time now since we became aware that
the tradition of the new is running in a circle. It's running so much in a circle
that, for today's histoncism, the latest novelty is to revive old styles. The para-
doxical lesson of this farce, pathetic perhaps but at least harmless, for once, is
that the word art, which must be kept, must also be forsaken, abandoned to its
insignificance and to the indifference with which the uninitiated, who knows
best, judges it. Put otherwise, the socialization of art, which has to blur the
contours of the word in order to put it on equal footing with all other kinds of
signifying practices, is the response to the sickening circular cooptation of its
institutionalization.
What's left to be said is the lesson of these two lessons. There is a tradition
of the whatever, there is a history of the whatever, with regard to which it is
now possible to unravel the historical paradox encountered at the outset of this
chapter. It aligns judgments, since each work that is part of this history is made
up of nothing but judgments, of choices. But this alignment is neither linear
nor circular: neither progress nor status quo; neither escalation nor tautology.
This history or this tradition is transmitted from one artist to another, from one
art movement to another, from one historical moment to another, and from

might w o n d e r if Benjamin, w h o for example wrote, "Modernism must be under the sign of
suicide . . It is the achievement of modernism in the realm of passions" (Charles Baudelaire,
p 75), would have had so clearsighted a conception of melancholy as a historical feeling if it
had not been for his own melancholic tendencies

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one work to another as judgments are transmitted, that is, through judgment:
as rejudged prejudices retrospectively constituting a junsprudential record. The
history of the modern avant-gardes, now that their violence is "recuperated"
by and in the discourse of historians and now that the conflicts having propelled
it have become historical objects, reveals itself to have been much less war-like
than juridical. That's why the word avant-garde disturbs so many people today;
it can't be bypassed by substituting the transavant-garde for it, especially when
despite all its denials the latter pretends to be the latest avant-garde.
The judgment through which the tradition of the whatever is transmit-
ted—that is, must I repeat? translated and betrayed—is aesthetic judgment. To-
day as in the time of Kant, who was the first to establish its form and this
once and for all, aesthetic judgment is a reflexive judgment. Its form, "form of
purposiveness" reflected by the "purposiveness of form," is neither linear nor
circular; if it could be represented it would sooner be—right, Marcel?—spi-
raled, like the idea of a circle that doesn't know what a circle is, so that it escapes
it. It doesn't lead from conditions to consequences; neither does it lead from a
projected goal to the means of obtaining it, and from the means to the achieved
goal. Art is not the condition, norm, or citerion of what artists do, any more
than it is its consequence, result, or effect. Neither is art the project, goal, objec-
tive of what artists do, any more than it is its means, medium, or technique.
This is not to say that art is not to be found in the outcome of what artists make
as well as in the making itself, or that it is not to be sought in the idea of art and
in its name, in the regulative idea by which one judges art so as to name it as such.
Here for the last time is the law of the readymade, the law of the modern: do
whatever so that it be called art. But make it such that, through what you will
have made—the thing resulting from your maxim—you make it felt that this
something was imposed on you by an idea of the anything whatever that is its
rule. This regulative idea can be an idea of the beautiful or of the sublime, an
idea of painting or of any other medium, an idea of revolution, an idea of real
or Utopian society, an idea of the artist or an idea of art or of the non-artist and
non-art. This regulative idea that truly imposes itself can be whatever idea, so
that you can act as if all such ideas were simultaneously valid, and imperatively

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valid. Act as if you had to take them all together for maxim, so that what you
will do will conform to any idea whatever, to the universal, i.e., impossible,
Idea of the whatever, this very Idea that modernity precisely called art.
The modern tradition was the network of transmission of two names, of
two proper names.20 Up until Dada the name of art was at stake in every art
practice. Fights around it and for it were engaged in. The establishment and
the avant-garde, but also the various avant-gardes among themselves, disputed
over it, often by way of refusal, as was the case in France, sometimes by way of
secession, as was the case in Central Europe. With the readymade, with Du-
champ, it is as if the name of art, devoid of meaning—for proper names have
no meaning, they only have referents—had tumbled into the condition of the
proper name in general, of any proper name, a name whose referents, without
ceasing to be singular objects, could just as well take on any name whatever,
whether they would be baptized anew, like Fountain, or left with their common
noun, like Hat Rack. So that the name of art became synonymous with
anything-whatever. Such is the judgment of the uninitiated today, after Dada
and its "recuperation." Such is also that of the "expert" (although, as you see,
it's obviously not a matter of expertise) who, along with Duchamp but with
some delay, judges the judgment of the uninitiated convincing and reflects on
it: modern art is the reign of the anything-whatever. That's what's said in the
streets. What's said here is the same but ought to be a little more precise: the
regulative Idea of modern art, after Dada, was the whatever.
I just named this Idea, and throughout this chapter I have named it often,
making it into a substantive by saying the whatever. Now, things can be named
only when they are nameable, that is, somehow finished, shaped, defined. Only
then are we allowed to name on solid grounds and in order to describe. It's for
the purpose of description, of historical truth if you will, that I availed myself
of the uninitiated's judgment and of its anticipation on the part of Rrose Selavy:
I named the whatever; it is the postmodern name of modern art. But I can't

20. See chapter 1

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side-step my responsibility. I had to name and I couldn't wait for whether things
were at all nameable. There was an urgency prompting me to call modern
art by that particular name; like Benjamin, I could not escape the somewhat
melancholic feeling of the one who senses permanent catastrophe, his back
turned into the wind of history. It blows hard and I don't know what it blows.
In any event there is little if no pleasure in having to say that modern art was
the reign of the whatever, even keeping in mind its contradictory richness. And
this is no longer a description, it's a judgment; it's no longer a name, it's a tone
of voice.
Is it a pessimistic tone? No. The pessimist expects something from the
future, he expects the worst. Is it a realist tone? No. The realist is resigned. Is
it a disenchanted tone? Yes. Modernity hasn't kept its promises. Is it a despairing
tone? Yes and no. If hope is always turned towards the future, then this tone
should be that of the hopeless ones, of all the hopeless ones of this world. But
it should also be that of hope—once a theological virtue and, since Ernst Bloch,
a principle—this hope about which Benjamin said that it is only problematically
given to those whom all hope has first abandoned. But he who signs these lines
doesn't feel he has the right to speak with this tone. He is much too privileged
to be able to speak with the intonation of the hopeless ones. He is also too
modern, still, too full of false hopes, arrogance, and immaturity, too depending,
in his historical and private being, on the Promethean pride of modernism, to
have reached the depths of despair. In writing this text he felt painfully run
through by an injunction beyond his will and summoned by its imperative tone,
which he had indeed to take on. But he is suspicious. Too much pathos, still,
and not enough ethos. After all he is but a child of his times, and the imperatives
of the time are perhaps only circumstantial and not as categorical as he might
think. But that's precisely what he wanted to say! One must judge hie et nunc;
when the universal is impossible, there are only circumstances! So, now that he
has spoken and judged, he has nothing to verify his judgment with except his
feelings. And these tell him that it is very hard, and perhaps impossible, to judge
whether the tone that grips his voice is that of the categorical imperative or that

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of the double bind. For there was more than just pain and fear entering the
writing of this text. There was also enthusiasm and much joy. But even the joy
is ambivalent. It was that of discovery, of words that come easily to the pen, of
ideas that arrange themselves on their own. It was the joy of seeing the descrip-
tion of an archaeological site compose itself without engaging the responsibility
of its scribe, for he wasn't its author. The circumstances of modernity, in being
ordered, ordered him to describe it thus. That stands, that doesn't belong to
him, the ground is cleared, one can look ahead anew. But precisely here the
scribe falls prey to suspicion, again. Isn't this joy impure and interested? What
if it were once again the vengeful joy of mastery? Hasn't the scribe once more
been the plaything of a ruse of history? Hasn't he given in to a seductive maneu-
ver, his own, as if despite himself he wanted to extort from history a supply of
future? Is he really free of Hegel, of the Hegel who lies dormant in every theo-
retician? He wants to cry out as a way of concluding without concluding: yes,
stop accusing me! Anticipation is not just the desire for prediction and mastery,
it is the biological duty of humankind! Humans themselves are premature; and
so was modernity! But this would still be a judgment. Who is he to dare? Isn't
he premature too? Shouldn't decency force him to retract his judgment on the
spot? He will cry, still more indecently yet: premature? Yes, I have come too
early. But if he cries that, especially if it's not in the wilderness, then the tone
of his voice will sound too much, infinitely too much not to be ridiculous, like
the sublime tone of the prophet. And the vice will retighten, Hegel will be
avenged again, this time as a farce. Does the one who recites these lines in a
tone that never has the ring of truth want to finish up with the prophets of
doom and those of liberation, with the two prophetic faces of modernity, that
of the Cite radieuse and that of Metropolis? But who does he think he is? He's
now playing the prophet himself! And yet, since ending is a must and avoiding
conclusion another, sanity perhaps requires that one ends with the irony of the
farce. Or with its ironism of affirmation, as Duchamp said, who, as you well know,
never spoke in the tones of a prophet, something that didn't prevent his posterity
from reserving him a choice place among the prophets of contemporary art. A

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spurious etymology, which amuses me all the more that it is incorrect but has
been made—so it seems—by the people, wants prophet to be related to profane.2'1
In the Hebrew tradition the prophet receives the command to speak the law,
he doesn't predict the future. And the profane, the uninitiated, stands before
the temple, before the law. In short he keeps it. If the prophet speaks with the
tone of the profane, then I am set free: he who just spoke of the anything-
whatever could have been anyone whoever.

21. Profane comes from the Latin pro-fanum, "before the temple," and prophet from the
Greek, pro-phemi, "to speak ahead." In order that the first derive from the second, one would
have to establish that fanum derives from fari, "to speak." The Lateinisches etymologisches Wdrter-
buch by A. Walde says in the article fanum: "Die Ableitung der Alten von fari (Paul. Fest.
88.93) ist trotz Vanicek 180, Prellwitz BB. 22, 79 (als "Bann" oder "Zugesprochenes Ge-
weihtes") nur Volksetymologie."

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