Bluebeard, or the folktale of superposition

For Heidegger, truth (aletheia) is more than the mere correspondence between fact and reality. There’s an act of unconcealment, or the act of something coming into presence from hiddenness.

In Bluebeard, the locked room is precisely that realm of hiddenness that has not yet been disclosed. Bluebeard’s nature “as murderer” is in the world, but concealed. The wife’s act of opening the door is then the event of disclosure, the clearing (Lichtung) through which truth emerges into presence.

Before the door is opened, Bluebeard’s being-as-murderer is not false; it’s simply veiled, suspended in the ontological shadow where Sein (Being) waits to be revealed.

Heidegger would say that this revelation is not just epistemic (a change in knowledge), but ontological (a change in being itself). The observer —the wife— participates in the unconcealment that brings a new world into being. Once revealed, it cannot be unrevealed; the world is irreversibly transformed.

So the “collapse” of Bluebeard’s quatum-like superposition is a Heideggerian event of disclosure, not a simple discovery of pre-existing fact.

For Deleuze, on the other hand, reality is made of two intertwined modes:

• The virtual, which is real but not yet actualized, containing all potential differences and becomings.
• And the actual, which entails what has been differentiated or manifested from the virtual.

Deleuze in this respect offers a vocabulary that may be even better suited to Schrödinger’s experiment in superposition.

Before the door is opened, Bluebeard’s status as “killer” exists virtually, as a real potential, just not yet determined. The wife’s gaze (the act of observation) is the ‘differentiation’ that actualizes one potential from the field of all possible ones.

But Deleuze wouldn’t say the wife “creates” that reality, rather, the act of opening the door is a process of actualization. The virtual includes both innocence and guilt, coexisting as potential intensities; the narrative event (opening the door) simply selects and manifests one.

Schrödinger’s cat is Deleuzian precisely because superposition is virtual: both alive and dead in potential, until actualized in one direction.

Going back to Bluebeard, this creates a Deleuzian fold in which the wife and Bluebeard are folded into each other’s actualization. Her curiosity and his hidden crime are not separate, but reciprocal conditions of becoming. Without her transgression, his identity remains virtual; without his secret, her transformation cannot occur.

The Bluebeard myth is therefore a human dramatization of the same metaphysical structure everyone’s favorite thought experiment exposes in physics: the dependence of reality on its modes of revelation.