Deferred Objects and the Policing of Continuity in Duchamp Discourse

Recent Duchamp scholarship has begun to exhibit a marked caution toward longitudinal interpretation. This paper does not propose a new attribution, chronology, or object-based claim. Instead, it documents a methodological shift: the growing tendency to treat cross-temporal continuity as a scholarly liability rather than an interpretive question. Using the appearance of a recently surfaced early twentieth-century artwork associated with unresolved questions of Duchamp's early practice as a test case, the paper examines how interpretive language adjusts prior to consensus. It argues that this preemptive narrowing departs from long-standing norms within Duchamp studies, where delay, deferred legibility, and retrospective intelligibility have traditionally been central analytical tools.