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Page 100
speak themselves! Furthermore, the whole process is flattering to his ego: ever since he started to manipulate language, he has been inclined to see himself as being on the side of God. It is beginning to occur to him that he may be one up on dear Eve. He begins to think that the poetic power is la différence.
However, Eve is by no means indifferent to her partner's passion for language. She just dabbles in it for different motives. Her meeting with the Serpent has already taken place, and the little which he can have told her (in the impoverished idiom of the Garden) has probably been charged with a mutual liking we investigators are in no position to speculate about, since semiotics has ''to pass over in silence what it cannot speak about."
At any rate, Eve joins in the game. And she explains to Adam that if words are Gods, then it's odd how the Serpent (ABBBA) has the same ending as the words which stand for beautiful, good, and red. Eve goes on to explain that poetry allows all sorts of language games:
(14)
ABBA
ABBBBA
ABBBBBA
ABBBA

«Good, beautiful and redis the Serpent» goes Eve's poem, and it entails just the same formal identity between expression and content as the one produced by Adam (12). Eve's sensitiveness has allowed her to go even further and to display the anaphorical smoothness of the beginning as a counterpoint to the rhymed gentleness of the end. Eve's approach reopens the whole problem of self-contradiction, which Adam's poem seems to have papered over. Just how can the Serpent be the formal equivalent of things which the language system excludes as his predicates?
Eve's success goes to her head. She vaguely imagines a new device for creating hidden homologies between form and content and for using these to produce new contradictions. She could, for example, try out a sequence where every letter, if analyzed against a microscopic grid, proved to be composed by one semantically opposed to it. But to carry off this type of 'concrete poetry' successfully would require a level of graphic sophistication which is quite beyond Eve's power. Adam therefore takes things into his own hands and conceives a still more ambiguous sequence:
(15)
BAAB.

Now what does the blank space stand for? If it really is a blank, then Adam has uttered the concept «bad» with a slight hesitation; but if the

 
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