THE REVERSE OF AN APPARENT IN THE WORLD

We will show that given the degree of appearance of a being, we can define the reverse of this degree, and therefore the support for logical negation—

or negation in appearing—as the simple consequence of our three funda-mental operations.

First of all, what is a degree of appearance which is ‘external’ to another given degree? It is a degree whose conjunction with the given degree is equal to zero (to the minimum)—for instance, the degree of appearance of the motorcycle noise with regard to that of the red of the ivy.

But what is the region of the world external to a given apparent? It is the region that gathers together all those apparents whose degree of appearance is external to the degree of appearance of the initial being-there—for instance, with regard to the red on the autumnal wall, the disparate collection comprising the degrees of noise of the skidding motorcycle, the trees on the hill behind me, the periodic mewling of the chainsaw, perhaps even the whiteness of the gravel, or the fleeting form of a cloud, and so on. But the stony wall, too bound up with the ivy, or the roof-tiles just above, gilded by the setting sun, certainly do not belong to the same region: these givens are not ‘without relation’ to the colour of the ivy; their conjunction with it does not amount to nil.

Finally, once we have the disparate set of beings that are there in the world but which in terms of their appearing have nothing in common with the scarlet ivy, what synthesizes their degrees of appearance, and

dominates as closely as possible all their measures? The envelope of this set.

In other words, that being whose degree of appearance is greater than or equal to those of all the beings that are phenomenologically alien to the initial being (in the case at hand, the ivy). This envelope will be what prescribes the reverse of the ivy, in the world ‘an autumn evening in the country’.

We will call ‘reverse’ of the degree of appearance of a being-there in a world, the envelope of the region of the world constituted by all the beings-there whose conjunc-tion with the first takes the value of zero (the minimum).

Given an apparent in the world (the gravel, the trees, the cloud, the mewling of the chainsaw. . .), its conjunction with the scarlet ivy is always transcendentally measurable. We always know whether its value is or is not the minimum, a minimum whose existence is required by every transcendental order. Finally, given all the beings whose conjunction with the ivy is nil, the existence of the envelope of this singular region of the world is guaranteed by the principle of the regional stability of worlds.

Now, this envelope is by definition the reverse of the scarlet ivy. So it’s clear that the existence of the reverse of a being is really a logical consequence of the three fundamental parameters of being-there: minimality, conjunction and the envelope.

It’s remarkable that what will serve to sustain negation in the order of appearing is the first consequence of the transcendental operations, and by no means an initial given. Negation, in the extended and ‘positive’ form of the existence of the reverse of a being, is a result. We can say that as soon as we are dealing with the being of the being of being-there, that is with the being of appearing as bound to the logic of a world, it follows that the reverse of a being exists, in the sense that there exists a degree of appear-ance ‘contrary’ to its own.

Once again, it’s worth following this derivation closely.

Take the character of Ariadne, at the very end of Ariadne and Bluebeard, when she leaves by herself—the other wives having refused to be freed from the bind of love and slavery that fastens them to Bluebeard. At this moment in the opera, what is the reverse of Ariadne? Bluebeard, more fascinated than ever by the splendid freedom of the one he failed to enslave, maintains a silence about which it can be argued that it is interior to the explosion of the feminine song, so that the value of the conjunction Bluebeard/Ariadne is certainly not nil. The conjunction with Ariadne of the surrounding villagers—who have captured and then freed Bluebeard, who no longer obey anyone but Ariadne and tell her: ‘Lady, truly, you are

too beautiful, it’s not possible . . .’—is certainly not equal to zero either. The Midwife is like an exotic part of Ariadne herself, her body without concept.

In fact, at the very moment of the extreme declaration of freedom—when Ariadne sings ‘See, the door is open and the countryside is blue’—those who subjectively have nothing in common with Ariadne, who make up her exterior, her absolutely heterogeneous feminine ‘ground’, are Bluebeard’s women, who can only think the relationship to man through the categories of conservation and identity. In so doing, they display their radical foreignness to the imperative which Ariadne imposes on the new feminine world—the world that opens up, contemporaneous with Freud, at the beginning of the century (the opera dates from 1906). Bluebeard’s women show this foreignness through refusal, silence or anxiety. It is musically clear then that the reverse of Ariadne’s triumphal song, which the men (the villagers and Bluebeard) paradoxically identify with, is to be sought in the group comprising the five wives: Ygraine, Mélisande, Bellangère, Sélysette and Alladine. And since the envelope of the group of the five wives is given—as we’ve already noted—by the degree of existence of Alladine, which is very slightly superior to the degree of the four others, we can conclude the following: in the world of the opera’s finale the reverse of Ariadne is Alladine.

The proof is provided in the staging of this preferential negation. I quote from the very end of the libretto:

ARIADNE: Will I go alone, Alladine?

At the sound of these words, Alladine runs to Ariadne, throws herself in her arms, and, wracked by convulsive sobs, holds her tightly and feverishly for a long while.

Ariadne embraces her in turn and, gently disentangling herself, still in tears, says:

Stay too, Alladine . . . Goodbye, be happy . . .

She moves away, followed by the Midwife.—The wives look at one other, then look at Bluebeard, slowly raising his head.—Silence.

We can see that the opera-world reaches its silent border, or its surge just before the silence, when the solitude of this woman, Ariadne, tearfully separates itself from its feminine reverse.

Dukas, who wrote a strange and vaguely sarcastic synopsis of his own opera, published in 1936 after his death, possessed an altogether precise awareness that the group of Bluebeard’s five wives constituted the negative of Ariadne. As he wrote, Ariadne’s relationship to these wives

is ‘clear if one is willing to reflect that it rests on a radical [emphasis in the text] opposition, and that the whole subject is based on Ariadne’s confusion of her own desire for freedom in love with the little need of it felt by her companions, born slaves of the desire of their opulent tormentor’. And he adds, referring to the final scene we’ve just quoted: ‘It is there that the absolute opposition between Ariadne and her companions will become pathetic, as the freedom that she had dreamed for them all gives way’.

Dukas will express the fact that Alladine synthesizes this feminine reverse of Ariadne, this absolute and latent negation, in a manner suited to the effects of the art of music: he writes that Alladine, at the moment of separation, is indeed ‘the most touching’.

11. THERE EXISTS A MAXIMAL DEGREE OF APPEARANCE