2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

292
A NACLASTIC SUPPLEMENTS
losophy and its cardinal concepts, like truth, subject, object, etc.—as the particular posi-
tions occupied by meaningless elements within a broader game of chess—or of
permutations
This last point becomes clearer if we consider that the anaclastic analogy must be read
in its full force: the “reflections” generated by the medium belong to a closed field since
they are the elements of a closed set with a finite number of elements and a finite, in fact a
very small number, of rules of transformations. To put it differently, the medium whose re-
fractive properties the anaclastic science studies is closed upon itself: it is not a semi-trans-
parent layer that separates an inner mythological construction from an outside where the
references of the sequences and themes belong. Rather, it is a warped surface, a crystal ball
of sorts where the rays, once entered, can never escape but keep bouncing, reflecting, and
refracting ad libitum, although not ad infinitum, and thus generate “in-terminable” contin-
uations according to the same medium-related pattern.
The truth of philosophy, e.g. the meaning of meaning that Ricoeur, according to Lévi-
Strauss, pretends to discover, is thus the illusion that the glass-cage can be opened, or
shoved aside, to find out what lies beyond it, it is the effort to hypostasize the reality of a
source that can only be hypothetical by asserting its ultimate reality. It is a delusory pre-
tense, though, because it is the glass-cage itself that produces the reality of the source, or
the illusion of the source thereof, throughout its reflections and refractions, e.g. its anaclas-
tic properties. There are no refractions without a refractive medium, no broken rays without
a breaking surface: properly speaking, there is nothing, that is, nothing meaningful, beyond
the glass, since meaning is precisely the effect of the glass itself on non meaningful ele-
ments. If meaning is an effect, the meaning of meaning in the traditional philosophical
sense, e.g. truth, is an effect as well, an effet de vérité which can serve a role for the believer
who is a full participant to the myths of a given culture but has no bearing outside of it. We
see, then—and quite unsurprisingly, given Lévi-Strauss reliance on the concept of game—
that the crucial feature that distinguishes the Structuralist project from philosophy passes
through the concept of closure, of the closure of the structured field whose operations pro-
duce meaning, a concept opposed to the end (even in its relativized, hermeneutic form that