2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE WORLD OF CANDRAKIRTI
interpretative squabbles, since, coming after the end of the book, it automatically enjoys the
distance necessary to judge the work in its entirety. Or so it seems.
The relative exteriority of paratext, in fact, raises a crucial theoretical issue: it is not
possible to decide whether the index itself is inside or outside the text; in other words,
whether it is or is not part of Mr. Palomar’s reflections. The index is both inside and outside,
this is the most that we can say: inside because its content is an integral part of the text itself,
but inevitably outside because it belongs to a level of discourse that has the text as its own
object. The logical location of the index is undecidable, as undecidable—because essential-
ly ambiguous—as the position of the player with respect to the game played. When the
player participates in the game, when he lets himself be completely absorbed by the inex-
orable combinatorics of the game, he is totally dissolved into the game. Consequently, he
annihilates himself through an identification with the game that is so total to enable the ec-
stasy of complete communion. As a matter of fact, however, the participant to the game
must paradoxically distance himself from the game in order to accept it as such. He must
be able to decide to start playing. The total combinatorial system is never simply given, but
always recognized first and eventually accepted 14 . This entails a distance between player
and game that is fatal to the functioning of the latter as a mechanism capable of solving the
impossibility of experience. Or, to be more precise, it is fatal to the success of the philo-
sophical position that assumes a certain reading of game as its guiding paradigm. Indeed,
we have seen how the doctrine of the world as play finds its ground in the resolution of the
voidness of experience into a close and organized system that must be able to radically sep-
arate its inside from its outside in order to function. The world of chess, in order to provide
an access to harmony, must be completely separated from everything surrounding it, it must
have nothing outside itself. The combinatorial structure I have described above is just the
14. Why? Because the combinatorial system is a system of differences, i.e., is a system made of differentiated
elements interacting with each other. A total unity given from the outset would be an essentially
undifferentiated unity. This is, of course, a basic Hegelian point I am relying on here, while disregarding,
however, the issue of the possibility of a whole beyond difference, fracture and master-slave dialectics,
as Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel that I am following here, would want it. See Alexandre
Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), partial Engl. translation id. Introduction
to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Basic Books, 1969) lecture 12 of year 1938-39.
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