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out comes God, who pronounces the first factual judgment. The general sense of what God is trying to tell them is as follows: ''You two probably imagine that the apple belongs to the class of good, edible things, because it happens to be red. Well, I've got news for you. The apple is not to be considered edible because it is bad." Obviously, God is above providing an explanation of why the apple is evil; he is himself the yardstick of all values and knows it. For Adam and Eve the whole thing is rather more tricky: they have grown into the habit of associating the Good with the Edible and the Red. Yet they cannot possibly ignore a commandment coming from God. His status in their eyes is that of an AA: he constitutes 'yes', an incarnation of the Positive. In fact, whereas the sequence AA is used with all other occurrences only for the purpose of connoting pairings of different sequences, in the case of God ('I am that I am'), AA is more than a mere formula of predication: it is his name. If they were a little more versed in theology, Adam and Eve would come to the conclusion that the serpent should be referred to as BB, but they are blissfully ignorant of such subtleties. Anyway, the serpent is blue and inedible, and only after God's commandment does it become a pertinent detail among all the items of Eden's resources.
God spoke and his words were /BAAAB. BABBAAAB. BAAB/ (apple inedible, apple bad).
This constitutes a factual judgment, as it affords a notion which is as yet unfamiliar to those God has addressed; for God is both referent and source of the referenthis pronouncements are a court of reference. Yet God's judgment is in part semiotic, for it posits a new type of connotative pairing between semantic units which had previously been coupled together differently.
Nevertheless, we shall see shortly how God committed a grave error by providing those very elements which could throw the whole code out of joint. In an effort to elaborate a prohibition which would put his creatures to the test, God provides the fundamental example of a subversion in the presumed natural order of things. Why should an apple which is red be inedible as if it were blue?
Alas, God wanted to bring into existence the cultural tradition, and culture is born, apparently, to the sound of an institutional taboo. It would be possible to argue that culture was implicitly present, granted the existence of language and that all God's creative activity was already a norm, a source of authority, a law. But who will ever be able to trace the precise order of events at that turning point in history? What if language was formed at a stage later than the issue of the prohibition? My present task is, not to solve the problem of the origins of language, but to manipulate a hypothetical speech model. All the same, we are entitled to insist that God acted rashly; it is too soon to establish where he went wrong. First, we must return to the evolving crisis in the Garden.

 
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