The second half of my introduction to Qoheleth pastes a ‘readymade’ gambler’s bond by Marcel Duchamp alongside the book’s opening chapter. The French dandy’s mock self-portrait highlights the complexities of the biblical Assembler’s name/title, his mischievous ploys in the game of wisdom, the metaphoric significance of the word hebel, and the spinning sensation rendered in reading the text. Constructing a readymade of Qoheleth as Duchamp, I play roulette with the first chapter, following its disconcerting poetics through to the next and retouching the Catalogue of Times with a comic cadence.
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Douglas Ingram, Ambiguity in Ecclesiastes (New York and London: T&T Clark, 2006), p. 12.
Michael A. Eaton, Ecclesiastes: An Introduction and Commentary (Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1983), p. 17.
J. Carlebach, ‘Wir sehen vielmehr im Stil des Buches, die echte, zu allen Zeiten im jüdischen Volke gängige Volkssprache’, in Das Buch Koheleth (Frankfurt: Hermon, 1936), p. 64; cf. A. Schoors, The Preacher Sought to Find Pleasing Words (Leuven: Peeters, 1992), p. 5.
George A. Barton, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Ecclesiastes (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1908), p. 22.
Cited in Schoors, p. 1.
Benjamin Lyle Berger, ‘Qohelet and the Exigencies of the Absurd’, Biblical Interpretation 9.2 (2001), pp. 141-79.
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language (trans. Robert Czerny; London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 99. It is, as Ricoeur’s discussion of Émile Benveniste reminds us, ‘discourse’ (discours), and not ‘speech’ (parole), p. 67.
Beyer, p. 11; cf. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. (eds.), Homosexuality in Modern France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 218.
Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), p. 206. Duchamp studies drown in such psychoanalytic circumflexion. Schwarz does not locate where Freud specifically suggests masturbation is a function of self-preservation, but Freud understood masturbation to be a primal addiction and, as a manifestation of the libido (life drive), an inexhaustible subject.
David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 47.
Juan Antonio Ramírez, Duchamp, Love and Death, Even (London: Reaktion Books, 1993), p. 183.
Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 159-94.
Ian Kelly, Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Dandy (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2005), p. 162.
As cited in Cabanne, p. 70.
Berger, pp. 158, 160. In Part I, we saw similar crimes of coherence and offences in style committed by Carlyle’s philosopher of clothes, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh.
Barton, p. 67.
Thomas Krüger, Qoheleth: A Commentary (trans. O.C. Dean; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), p. 39.
Eaton, p. 24.
Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp, A Biography (London: Henry Holt, 1996), pp. 15-16.
Longman, p. 69.
Berger, p. 155.
Longman, p. 72. Longman continues, ‘There is a double repetition of mah-še (whatever … what) as well as hû’še, in addition to the recurrent use of the verbs hāyâ (“to be”) and ‘āśâ (“to do”)’ (p. 72).
T.A. Perry, Dialogues with Koheleth: The Book of Ecclesiastes, Translation and Commentary (Unviersity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), p. 58.
Koosed, p. 46.
Brown, Driver and Briggs, p. 1064.
Norbert Lohfink, Qoheleth (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), p. 59.
Longman, p. 111.
Berger, p. 163.
Mark Sneed, ‘(Dis)closure in Qoheleth: Qoheleth Deconstructed’, JSOT 27.1 (September 2002), pp. 115-26.
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The second half of my introduction to Qoheleth pastes a ‘readymade’ gambler’s bond by Marcel Duchamp alongside the book’s opening chapter. The French dandy’s mock self-portrait highlights the complexities of the biblical Assembler’s name/title, his mischievous ploys in the game of wisdom, the metaphoric significance of the word hebel, and the spinning sensation rendered in reading the text. Constructing a readymade of Qoheleth as Duchamp, I play roulette with the first chapter, following its disconcerting poetics through to the next and retouching the Catalogue of Times with a comic cadence.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 193 | 32 | 4 |
Full Text Views | 175 | 0 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 22 | 1 | 0 |