Reading Blindly: Literature, Otherness, and the Possibility of an ...

It is this pact with the serpent—the pact that God and the serpent have in secret—that sets the scene for the woman to know of the fruit: after all, if God created everything and has full knowledge of everything that is to happen, then both the serpent and the question are also of Yahweh's creation. ¹⁶ It is this secret pact (even though the serpent is a creation of Yahweh, Yahweh still needs its complicity in this matter: full knowledge does not necessarily equate to full control) that opens the possibility of the woman eating the fruit in the first place. One must not forget that it is she who first ate of the tree; it is she who made the blind choice by positing the possibility that perhaps God didn't really mean not to eat from the tree. It is this pact that maintains the possibility of questioning and, more importantly, the possibility that humankind can choose for itself, can have access to the “knowledge of good and evil.” It is also the question that ensures that we can continue reading—as knowledge can never totalize—that reading itself can continue.

What this suggests is that a prescriptive answer to the questions (how to read properly, that is, ethically; did (s)he really say that?) is impossible, for every statement would only hold true in a particular moment, a particular situation, a singular moment. After all, at her moment of choosing to eat of the tree, all the woman could do is to posit whether God really said that or not; there is no certainly, only a possibility or a momentary potentiality for it to be true. It is these moments, these singular particularities, that we will listen for (we cannot always see them, for they are hidden somewhere in the text, within the text, with the text). All we can hope to do is to listen out for these moments, these details, for as Jean Baudrillard reminds us, there is no finer parallel universe than that of the detail or the fragment.