In art and art history, influence is a tricky concept, difficult to trace, often impossible to seriously document, and since quite some time easy to deconstruct. As Borges and many others after him have demonstrated, the roles of influencer and influenced are not stable and overlap in more than one sense: Without Kafka (“influenced”), there would have been no forerunners (“influencers”) of Kafka.
The relationship between Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), perhaps the most “influential” artist of the twentieth century, and Raymond Roussel (1877–1933), the no less radical yet much less successful French writer who is claimed to have had a decisive influence on Duchamp as well as many literary and artistic movements, from Surrealism to the New Novel or postmodern poetry, is a wonderful test case for an in-depth reflection on the question of influence. On the one hand, Duchamp knew of Roussel’s work as early as 1912—they also sporadically met,...