2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

T HE IRREPARABLE LIGHT OF DAWN
the possibility of the meaningfulness of any experience by the recognition of the subject’s
failure to transcend the limits of its own language and its own history—produces exactly
the opposite effect. As we seen above, it is precisely at the moment when even the ultimate
experience, death itself, becomes an empty simulacrum that the final transfiguration takes
place: to expose the purely positional nature of any possible experience, to show its essen-
tial voidness, means to bring about the total combinatorial system in which everything
means because it refers to everything else.
If the intrinsic and inevitable duplicity of Mr. Palomar’s death arches back from the
end of the book to its beginning and to the whole novel, then how should we read in Mr.
Palomar? The book seems to end on a tragic note: not even defeat is possible, not even
death. Mr. Palomar is forever condemned to play games others have started, prisoner of the
most original inauthenticity. He had begun his search from in anxious consciousness of a
separation from the world. Once the search is over, he cannot but recognize the inevitability
of the original fracture. His meager and sole consolation is that he can enjoy his understand-
ing of its inexorable internal dynamics.
But is such a consolation really meager or is it more than is ordinarily given to think?
4. The irreparable light of dawn
The reading of Mr. Palomar I attempted in the preceding pages has shown that the im-
possibility to reach a full experience of the worlds and things and the consequent search for
harmony—i.e. the search for an organic relationship with the world in which the subject is
completely absorbed by the system outside him—generates what I called the “dialectic of
partiality.” “Partial” because the connection of the subject of experience with the world is
always imperfect insofar as it is always marked by a fracture impossible to transcend with-
out the generation of a dialectic that produces a recurring transmutation of one of its mo-
ments into its opposite.
Mr. Palomar is able to carry out his everyday affairs, he can buy his cheese and he can
hear the blackbirds, although in an inauthentic way; when he tries to overcome such inau-
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