I had to press the return function of the remote control when I believed to hear that Paul Gégauff, main actor and writer of the novel which is the base of Chabrols "Une partie de plaisir", says about his wife: "She sides with Korzybski who claims to refuse Aristote, but she hasn't read either one". I heard right. Although I had mentioned polycontextural logic in a couple of my comments, I would have never expected to find it actually in a film - and here we are.
If you reject Aristotelian logic, you give up the whole fundamental of our thinking. With the logical categories of position and negation, also the corresponding ethical categories good and bad are abolished. In such a world everything has to be defined newly, and most things are not anymore either good or bad, but both good and bad or neither one for which a term has still to be invented. I have no idea how Gégauff came to the idea to introduce the founder of General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, in this movie. However, one could imagine that Korzybski's most important mathematical feature, the "multi-ordinality", is seen here as the metaphysical principle of the open marriage structure of the couple which finally leads into one of the most brutal catastrophes ever seen in a movie. The concept of multi-ordinality replaces unambiguous mappings through ambiguous ones - yet, not in a chaotic, but exactly restricted sense. Possibly, in the eyes of Gégauff's character, his wife breaks out of this restricted area when she goes into a sexual relationship with Habib. Gégauff's character says clearly: "Earlier, she preferred sublime culture, and now she is wallowing in the mud of human scum". (By the way: Also the highly sophisticated language which Gégauff's character uses in order to damn every lower level of human existence into hell, shows a philosophical background which is hard to find anymore.) Thus, his wife crossed the border restricted by the Korzybski-functions and is to be condemned because of that. Up to this moment, Gégauff's character still appears as the guardian of a consistently valid metaphysics; e.g., to his future new wife he underlines many times that he feels freed and relaxed. So, the real breaking-point in the story of this movie is there, where Gégauff himself abandons his own metaphysical principles. From his unreachable position, he comes so-to-say down and turns into a vulgar stalker and beggar who is ashamed about himself. However, the story seems to trespass another border, too, namely the border between Gégauff's character and Gégauff, the writer, himself. In the movie he (almost?) kills his wife on a cemetery, in his real live (just a few years after the movie) he was stabbed to death by his second wife, on Christmas' Eve. Therefore, the final question arises: Does the reflexivity which arises when somebody plays himself still belong to Korzybski's principle or does it violate this principle, because self-reflexivity is excluded in a multi-ordinal world?'- It is.
If you reject Aristotelian logic, you give up the whole fundamental of our thinking. With the logical categories of position and negation, also the corresponding ethical categories good and bad are abolished. In such a world everything has to be defined newly, and most things are not anymore either good or bad, but both good and bad or neither one for which a term has still to be invented. I have no idea how Gégauff came to the idea to introduce the founder of General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, in this movie. However, one could imagine that Korzybski's most important mathematical feature, the "multi-ordinality", is seen here as the metaphysical principle of the open marriage structure of the couple which finally leads into one of the most brutal catastrophes ever seen in a movie. The concept of multi-ordinality replaces unambiguous mappings through ambiguous ones - yet, not in a chaotic, but exactly restricted sense. Possibly, in the eyes of Gégauff's character, his wife breaks out of this restricted area when she goes into a sexual relationship with Habib. Gégauff's character says clearly: "Earlier, she preferred sublime culture, and now she is wallowing in the mud of human scum". (By the way: Also the highly sophisticated language which Gégauff's character uses in order to damn every lower level of human existence into hell, shows a philosophical background which is hard to find anymore.) Thus, his wife crossed the border restricted by the Korzybski-functions and is to be condemned because of that. Up to this moment, Gégauff's character still appears as the guardian of a consistently valid metaphysics; e.g., to his future new wife he underlines many times that he feels freed and relaxed. So, the real breaking-point in the story of this movie is there, where Gégauff himself abandons his own metaphysical principles. From his unreachable position, he comes so-to-say down and turns into a vulgar stalker and beggar who is ashamed about himself. However, the story seems to trespass another border, too, namely the border between Gégauff's character and Gégauff, the writer, himself. In the movie he (almost?) kills his wife on a cemetery, in his real live (just a few years after the movie) he was stabbed to death by his second wife, on Christmas' Eve. Therefore, the final question arises: Does the reflexivity which arises when somebody plays himself still belong to Korzybski's principle or does it violate this principle, because self-reflexivity is excluded in a multi-ordinal world?'- It is.