Between 'images' and 'fromages'. Lyotard on Painting’s Critical Force

In this essay I want to focus on Jean-François Lyotard’s interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s “The Large Glass” which I confront with Duchamp’s idea of pictorial nominalism. I invoke the main thesis from Lyotard’s important essay “Freud selon Cézanne,” to draw a line between Lyotard’s analysis of artistic experience of space in Cézanne’s work and the topological conceptuality traced by Lyotard in spatial relations within Duchamp’s “The Large Glass.” I want to show that the concept of “transformation” that is introduced in Lyotard’s interpretation of Duchamp’s works, operates within certain spatial analysis which lays the foundations for philosophical analysis in situ, or, as Lyotard writes, “topological politics.” For Lyotard this is the exact context to proceed the meditation of transformational potential hidden within the idea of presentation and representation of the space that becomes visible when one starts to notice incongruences as well as congruences.