This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.

---

5. I owe much of this analysis to a conversation with Werner Hamacher.

6. It is perfectly apt that the term read both signifies the past and the present tense of the same process. In reading, there is the collision of both the past and the present, memory and forgetting; perhaps reading is always a future possibility, a potentiality.

7. Gen. 3:1 (italics added).

8. Gen. 3:3. The only recorded words are what God said to man; we only hear of what God said to the woman from her representation—and, perhaps, interpretation—of the admonition not to eat from the tree.

9. Gen. 3:4–5.

10. It was not the eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge that caused man and woman to lose eternal life, it was the fact that after eating from the tree, they were banished from the garden and so were unable to eat from the tree of life: “See, the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch his hand out next and pick from the tree of life also, and eat some and live for ever” (Gen. 3:22).

11. Gen. 3:7.

12. Gen. 3:22.

13. Gen. 2:16–17.

14. Gen. 3:22.

15. It is this choosing that is blind to both the law and what it chooses—this choice that was made in double blindness—that we will examine, that we will attempt to see. And in trying to think the question, how to read properly, that is, ethically? we will allow the other question, did (s)he really say that? to haunt us, to question us, to question the question itself.

16. In effect, the serpent is the autoimmunity of Yahweh in order to ensure that Yahweh's law would not be fully obeyed, would not be a totalizing law: the serpent's question opened the possibility that the woman consumed the fruit, and as a result, humankind became “one of us” and received the knowledge of the God(s) themselves.