Presented herein is an ongoing endeavor to collect and record the notable discussions and examples of the term "infra-slim" investigated by artist and chess enthusiast Marcel Duchamp. As elaborated on elsewhere, this designation can never be defined or used in the capacity of naming. Rather it is an adjective applied in certain instances of imaginative and perceptual uncertainty.

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Joan Retellack in conversation with John Cage:
John Cage: One of Marcel’s musical words is, do you know it? His term “infra-mince”? Infra-mince meanns super-thin, or sub-thin, thinner than thin. He was very interested in pointing out examples of super-thinness and that’s what the book called Notes is about. One example of super-thinness is if you’re on a bus or subway and someone gets up, to go and sit where that person was. You would then feel the warmth of that person in a very thin way. (laughs)
Joan Retellack: Yes, I felt that on the subway this morning. (laughter)
JC: That interested him that sort of thing. One way of doing that, he said, to produce sound, an infra-mince sound, would be dancers with corduroy trousers. (laughter) Without any music other than legs against legs. So that would be …probably, that would end the first act [of the Noh-opera].
JR: So this would involve Merce Cunningham.
JC: Yes.
JR: And dancers with corduroy trousers.

Cage, John, Musicage: Cage Muses on Words, Art, Music, (Connecticut: Wesleyan University, 1996) p.232

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"Infrathin, he further maintained (#5), was an adjective, not a noun, the naming function being suspect in his lexicon. Indeed, infrathin, Duchamp declared, cannot be defined, ‘One can only give examples of it.’ Here are a few:

"The warmth of a seat (which has just been left) is infra-thin (#4)

"In time the same object is not the / same after a 1 second interval — what / relations with the identity principle? (#7)

"Subway gates — The people / who go through at the very last moment / Infra thin — (#9 recto)

"Velvet trousers- / their whistling sound (in walking) by/ brushing of the 2 legs is an / infra thin separation signaled /by sound. (it is not? An infra thin sound) (#9)

"When the tobacco smoke smells also of the /mouth which exhales it, the 2 odors / marry by infra thin (olfactory / in thin). (#11)

"Infra thin separation between / the detonation noise of a gun / (very close) and the apparition of the bullet/ hole in the target.... (#12)

"Difference between the contact / of water and that of/ molten lead for ex,/or of cream./ with the walls of its / own container .... this difference between two contacts is infra thin. (#14)

"2 Forms cast in / the same mold (?) differ / from each other/ by an infra thin separative /difference. ‘Two men are not / an example of identicality / and to the contrary / move away / from a determinable / infra thin difference — but (#35)

"just touching . While trying to place 1 plane surface on another plane surface/ you pass through some infra thin moments — (#46)"

Perloff, Marjorie "'But isn’t the same at least the same?': Translatability in Wittgenstein, Duchamp, and Jacques Roubaud" published in Jacket #14. Parenthetical notation indicates quotes from Marcel Duchamp, Notes, presentation and translation by Paul Matisse (Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980); rpt. Boston: G. K. Hall. 1983. The notes are reproduced as facsimile scraps, with the French and English print versions at the bottom of the page. Slash marks indicate the end of the line in the handwritten version. The book is unpaginated but the notes are numbered.

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Luggage Physics
Determine the difference between the volumes of air displaced by a clean shirt (ironed and folded) and the same shirt when dirty.

Coincidental fitting of objects or parts of objects; the hierarchy of this kind of fitting is directly proportional to the “disparate.”

WHEN
THE TOBACCO SMOKE
SMELLS OF THE MOUTH           
WHICH EXHALES IT
THE TWO ODORS
ARE MARRIED BY
INFRA-SLIM

"I chose on purpose the word slim which is a word with human, affective, connotations, and is not an exact laboratory measure. The sound or the music which corduroy trousers, like these, make when one moves, is pertinent to infra-slim. The hollow in the paper between the front and back of a thin sheet of paper….To be studied!....it is a category which has occupied me a great deal over the last ten years. I believe that by means of the infra-slim one can pass from the second to the third dimension.”

Marcel Duchamp, The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, Ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Oxford, 1973) pp. 192, 194