2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE WORLD OF CANDRAKIRTI
biguity, in other words, is structural, because it is impossible, on the basis of the text, to
decide for one or for the other; that is, it is impossible to decide whether Mr. Palomar’s fate
is a triumph or a rout.
Paradoxically enough, the last remark makes even more enigmatic the status of the in-
dex. In fact, it seems to oscillate between two opposite and irreconcilable extremes. On the
one hand, it can be read as the exemplification of the combinatorial structure that pervades
the whole work. In this sense, and in virtue of its privileged textual position, the index can
be interpreted as the reason and ground of Mr. Palomar. On the other hand, the very expo-
sition of such an interpretation makes it unacceptable. The paratextual position of the index
implies a distance between its content and the text that makes the whole combinatorial con-
struction vain, since its content—the thematization of the combinatorial game—should be
present within the text as one of the possible experiences. The perfect language capable of
expressing every possible experience cannot tolerate any meta-linguistic reflection, lest its
perfection be lost 15 . The contradiction between these two aspects of the index, the contra-
diction between what the index says of the text and what it does to it in virtue of its external
location, the contradiction between its constative and performative dimensions is ultimate-
ly unsolvable. Its logical status, even its very existence contradict what it says.
This has some broader implications for the interpretation of Mr. Palomar at large. The
reading offered by the index succeeds in the difficult task of enclosing in a single gesture
the essential duplicity of the text that we have I have shown is condensed in its last sen-
tence. In the index—and in the whole text—both irreconcilable dimensions of triumph and
defeat are simultaneously present. Mr. Palomar, to put it differently, brings to view the ir-
reducible antinomy generated by the fracture of presence, by the original division from the
world of things and of the others, an antinomy that I have tried to retrace in the paradigmatic
form it assumes in the death of Mr. Palomar and particularly in the double dimension of
triumph and defeat that distinguishes it. The triumph that abolishes the original division in
a total communion with the world of pure appearance under the aegis of combinatorics and
15. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of the perfect language in Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
The Prose of the World (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973) 3-8.
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