IT MUST BE POSSIBLE TO THINK, IN A WORLD, WHAT DOES NOT APPEAR WITHIN THAT WORLD

There are numerous ways in which this point could be argued. The most immediate is that, presuming that it is impossible to think the non-appearance of a being in a given world, it would be necessary that every being be thinkable as appearing within it. This would entail that said world localizes every being. Consequently, this would be the Universe or the Whole, the impossibility of which we have already established.

We can also argue on the basis that the thinking of being-there necessarily includes the possibility of a ‘not-being-there’, without which it would be identical to the thinking of being-qua-being. For this possibility to be transcendentally effective, a zero degree of appearing must be capable of exposition. In other words, for appearing to be consistent requires the existence of a transcendental marking of non-appearing, or a logical mark of non-appearance. The thinkability of non-appearance rests on this marking, which is the intra-worldly index of the not-there of a multiple.

Finally, we can say that the evaluation of the degree of identity or dif-ference between two beings would be ineffective if these degrees were themselves not situated on the basis of their minimum. That two beings are strongly identical in a determinate world makes sense to the extent that the transcendental measure of this identity is ‘large’. But ‘large’ in turn is meaningless unless referred to ‘less large’ and finally to ‘nil’, which in designating zero-identity also authorizes a thinking of absolute difference.

Thus, the necessity of a minimal degree of identity in the end stems from the fact that worlds are in general not Parmenidean (which is instead the case for being as such, or the ontological—that is mathematical—

situation): they admit of absolute differences, which are thinkable within appearing only insofar as non-appearing is also thinkable.

These three arguments sanction the conclusion that there exists, for every world, a transcendental measure of the not-apparent-in-this-world,

which is obviously a minimum (a sort of zero) within the order of the evaluations of appearing.

Let us keep in mind, however, that strictly speaking a transcendental measure always bears on the identity or difference of two beings in a determinate world. When we speak of an ‘evaluation of appearing’, as we’ve been doing from the start, this is only for the sake of expediency. For what is measured or evaluated by the transcendental organization of a world is in fact the degree of intensity of the difference of appearance of two beings in this world, and not an intensity of appearance considered ‘in itself’.

Insofar as the transcendental is concerned, it follows that the thinking of the non-apparent comes down to saying that the identity between an ontologically determinate being and every being that really appears in a world is minimal (in other words, nil for what is internal to this world).

Since it is identical to nothing that appears within a world, or (which amounts to the same) absolutely different from everything that appears within it, it can be said of this being that it does not appear within the given world. It is not there. This means that to the extent that its being is attested and therefore localized, this takes place somewhere else (in another world), not there.

Since this book has less than 700 pages, 721 does not appear within it, because none of the numbers that collate its paginated substance can be said to be, even in a weak sense, identical to 721, with regard to this book qua world.

This consideration is not arithmetical (ontological). We have already noted that, after all, two arithmetically differentiated pages—445 and 446, for example—can, by dint of their sterile and repetitive side, be considered as transcendentally ‘very identical’ from the perspective of the world that the book constitutes. The transcendental can bring forth intra-worldly identities from absolute ontological differences. This is all the more so in that it plays upon degrees of identity (whence the intelligibility of the localization of beings): my two arguments are ‘close’, pages 445 and 446

‘repeat one another’, and so on.

But as concerns page 721, it is not in the book in the following sense: no page is capable of being, whether strongly or feebly, identical to page 721.

To put it in other terms: supposing that one wants to force page 721 to be co-thinkable in and for the world that this book is, one can at most say that the transcendental measure of the identity between ‘721’ and every page of this book-world—itself in particular—is nil (minimal). One will conclude that the number 721 does not appear in this world.

The delicate point is that it is always through an evaluation of minimal identity that I can pronounce on the non-apparent. It makes no sense to transform the judgment ‘Such and such a being is not there’ into an onto-logical judgment. There is no being of the not-being-there. What I can say about such a being, with respect to its localization—with respect to its situation of being—is that its identity to such and such a being of this situation or this world is minimal, that is nil according to the trans-cendental of this world. Appearing, that is the local or worldly attestation of a being, is logical through and through, which is to say relational. It follows that the apparent conveys a nil degree of relation, and never a non-being pure and simple.

If I forcibly suppose that a very beautiful woman—Ava Gardner, let’s say—partakes in the world of the cloistered (or dead?) wives of Bluebeard, it is on the basis of the eventual nullity of her identity to the series of spouses (her identity to Sélysette, Ygraine, Mélisande, Bellangère and Alladine has the minimum as its measure), but also of the zero degree of her identity to the other-woman of the series (Ariadne), that I will con-clude that she does not appear within that world—not on the grounds of the supposed ontological absurdity of her marriage with Bluebeard. An absurdity which moreover would have been undercut had she come to play the role of Ariadne in Maeterlinck’s opera, in which case it would have indeed been necessary—in accordance with the transcendental of the theatre-world—to pronounce oneself, via her performance, on the degree of identity between ‘her’ and Ariadne, and therefore on her apparent-interiority to the scenic version of the tale. This problem was already posed by Maeterlinck’s mistress, Georgette Leblanc, about whom we can legitimately ask if, and to what extent, she is identical to Ariadne, since she claimed to have been her model and even her genuine creator—in particu-lar when Ariadne acknowledges (in an admirable aria penned by Dukas) that most women do not want to be freed. This identity is all the more strongly affirmed in that Georgette Leblanc, a singer, created the role of Ariadne after having been refused that of Mélisande in Debussy’s opera—

something that wounded her greatly. So it makes sense to say that the degree of identity between (the fictional) Ariadne and (the real) Georgette Leblanc is very high.

This is how the question of a non-nil degree of identity between Georgette Leblanc and Ava Gardner could have arisen, how it could have come to be there, in a logically instituted worldly connection between writing, love, music, theatre and cinema. If this is not so, it is because, in

every attested world, the transcendental identity between Ava Gardner and Bluebeard’s women takes the minimal value prescribed by that world.

It also follows from this that there is an absolute difference between the matador Luis Miguel Dominguin (Ava Gardner’s notorious lover) and Bluebeard. At least this is the case in every attested world, including in The Barefoot Contessa, Mankiewicz’s very beautiful film, where the whole question is that of knowing if the beauty of Ava Gardner can pass unscathed from the matador to the Italian count Torlato-Favrini. The film’s transcendental response is ‘no’. She dies. As we shall see, to die only ever means to cease appearing, in a determinate world.

6. THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO APPARENTS IN A WORLD