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

same and slightly different at the same time—is not one that can be defined; it can only be described, narrated (and only after the event). After all, the first time we are made aware of his new name is in Acts 13:9—“Then Saul, whose other name is Paul.” It is not as if Saul had suddenly shed his old self and is now a new being: Paul is his other within his old self, Paul is the becoming Christian of Saul. In other words, Paul is the gap, the space within Saul himself, the site of becoming that is the Christian. All that can be said is, perhaps, what this site of negotiation is not; in this sense, at best, all that can be said is proscriptive. This is precisely because the space of imagination is not an object, but rather, the space itself is what is being imagined: it is the imagination of the possibility of the third, the third that is always in a state of becoming, that allows this transubstantiation to take place.

This space of imagination, this imagination of a space, is what allows for reading to take place. After all, reading is never done, it is constantly becoming. ⁶

It was Saul's positing of the possibility of a space between the Jew and the non-Jew that gives rise to the term Christian. It was Saul's blindness to the fact that one cannot know the will of God—he had to act according to the “voice” that he heard, that only he had heard, and act according to this event, this singularity that cannot be explained—that allowed for the Christian. In order to act, Saul had to read the “voice” in blindness—posit a reading that is ultimately illegitimate and unverifiable. Hence, the question that continues to haunt the work of Paul, the question that cannot be answered, will always be, what did the voice say?

There is an echo of this in the eternal question that haunts the Bible itself: “Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?” ⁷ This is the question that is unanswered, and never answerable: after all, no one will know what God said to the woman. Even if we accept the validity of her words, “But