The Concept of “Apparure” in the Works of Henri Raynal

For Henri Raynal, ‘clothing does not rank as high as it deserves.’ Un-guided by doctrine, it plays a major role and cannot be reduced to the logics of need. The volitional and loving attention that Raynal gives to clothing led him to coin the concept of “apparure,” or “apparance” (appearance and apparel), and to distinguish between two levels: a first artifice is given, that of corporeity which already reveals a ‘coquetry of the physis’; and a second artifice, that of the clothing itself which is another degree of the visible edifice and which can, if it espouse the first artifice harmoniously, reveal interiority to the senses. The poetic virtue of clothing is that of finiteness which, by embracing an artifice with an artifice, summons mystery and enigma. From this embrace, ‘there results an attested magic... which the inexhaustible tricks of the dialectic between veiling and unveiling are far from sufficient to account for’.