Por uma pragmática da inutilidade, ou o valor do inframince

Marcel Duchamp describes the infrathin as “the most minute of intervals, or the slightest of differences” (in Perloff 2002: 101). Working through Duchamp’s proposition, and taking him at his work that the infrathin cannot be defined as such – “One can only give examples of it” (in de Duve 1991: 160) – this paper explores how the infrathin comes to expression and asks what a politics of the infrathin might look like. Key to the exploration is the question of how else value can be defined and how this rethinking of the concept of value might compose with the concept of a pragmatics of the useless.