2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

26
P RELUDE
the rout that derives from the recognition of the impossibility to surpass such a fracture and
the resignation to the distance. However, to illustrate such an antinomy, to explain it in the
language of the reader is altogether impossible, I believe, since what Mr. Palomar makes
clear without saying is how the two dimensions are inextricably connected. It is impossible
to choose between one or the other because both are always simultaneously present. Or
rather, because any effort to isolate one of them immediately converts it into the opposite.
This is why we can define as a dialectic what Mr. Palomar brings to light. We have seen
exemplified this dialectic in the index: the death of Mr. Palomar, as well as each one of the
experiences he narrates, is always and at the same time inside and outside the structure that
might give it a meaning. It is always inside a determined game, within a specific signifying
chain. It has always a sense but a sense that is always ‘partial’, never fully given and never
fully masterable 16 . The chess game has always already started and death (be it real or not,
i.e. the end of the individual or collective experience) always occurs before the game is
over. This, nonetheless, does not mean that the game cannot be played. The sudden shift
from one of the dimensions to its opposite happens only when one tries to isolate and de-
limit any experience whatsoever in its absolute identity. It happens when one tries to sepa-
rate completely what is inside the individual experience from what lies outside it.
I have tried to show that any experience can be made significant through its insertion
in a complex, dynamic, and completely closed combinatorial system. However, the con-
struction of such a cathedral of the spirit, once terminated, misses its goal insofar as it im-
mediately expresses its own incompleteness by the reference to its builder. The effort to
reach a total transparency of experience turns, then, into its opposite: in the total vacuity of
any possible experience. Conversely, the “annihilation” of experience—the effort to negate
16. A full explanation of this term would require more space than I can afford here. The essential reference
is to Derrida’s work, and in particular to Limited Inc., where, while discussing speech act theory, he
challenges the possibility to close a set of utterances against any possible intrusion from the outside.
He denies that a definite and absolute meaning can be assigned, and underlines that any analysis trying
to retrieve a fixed meaning “will still form part of the ensemble and will therefore raise the same questions.
It will necessarily be what I will here call a prise de partie, that is: partial. It will be always be
lacking the completeness of a set.” The next few pages of this essay can be seen as a tentative application
of the preceding discussion of the concept of play to Derrida’s thought. See Jacques Derrida,
Limited Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1977) 39 and following.