The Garden of Double Messages: Deconstructing Hierarchical Oppositions in the Garden Story

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the analysis of four hierarchical oppositions in the Garden of Eden story: ‘good-bad’ (‘Good-‘Evil’), ‘male-female’, ‘human-animal’ (‘culture-nature’), ‘life-death’ (‘cosmos-chaos’). A deconstructive reading of the story is proposed which subverts these oppositions. Several double messages can be discovered in the story, including: eating from the Tree of Knowledge is both ‘good’ and ‘bad’; ‘female’ both precedes ‘male’ and represents a later ‘supplement’ to it; the source of (the corruption of) culture lies in nature, but nature itself is represented as something late and ‘supplementary’, a kind of ‘culture’; the world into which Adam and Eve were exiled reflects both Life and Death, Cosmos and a (partial) return to Chaos.

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