2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

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P RELUDE
thenticity, however, he is projected onto a metaphysical seesaw that bumps him alternative-
ly from a cosmos where everything is ordered but from which he is excluded, to a
disordered universe where every experience means nothing.
According to Agamben, this unsurpassable dialectic lies at the root of all metaphysics.
The form it assumes in Mr. Palomar represents with particular efficacy, I believe, its last
reincarnation. It is such a negative ground, such a primitive fracture that unfetters the dia-
lectics that must be identified at the origin of metaphysics and not the overvaluation of truth
over appearance (or vice versa) that can be obtained if the dialectics is temporarily (and im-
possibly) frozen into one of its moments. To quote Agamben from Stanzas
metaphysics is not, in fact, simply the interpretation of the fracture of
presence as a duality of appearance and essence, of signifier and signified,
of sensible and intelligible; rather, that the original experience be always already
caught in a fold, be already simple in the etymological sense
(sim--plex, “once pleated”), that presence be always already caught in a signification:
this is precisely the origin of Western metaphysics. 17
What I have been trying to show through my reading of Mr. Palomar is perhaps only this
simple fold that cuts through experience. I have tried to underline how harmony—seem-
ingly the positive solution of such a fold—is indeed only its flip side. Indeed, as Agamben
writes elsewhere, the transition between man and world that the concept of harmony is
called to resolve by unfolding its inherent contrast
is always already conceived as an arthron, an articulation; or rather, as a
discontinuity that is also a continuity, a removal that is also a preservation
(arthron, like armonia, originally derives from the language of woodworking;
armotto signifies to conjoin, to unite, as the woodworker does with two
pieces of wood).In this sense, the Voice is truly the invisible harmony, which
Heraclitus says was stronger than visible harmony (armonie aphanes phaneres
kreitton; fr. 54 Diels), because in its double negativity, it enacts the
conjoinment that constitutes the essence of that zoon logou echon that is
man. 18
17. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas…, 156.
18. Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1991) 85.