Three Folds: Searching For Milton's "Paradise Lost" Between Moses, Lacan and Derrida

The University of Notre Dame
Three Folds: Searching for Milton's "Paradise Lost" between Moses, Lacan and Derrida
Author(s): Matthew Biberman
Source: Religion & Literature, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Autumn, 2006), pp. 177-201
Published by: The University of Notre Dame
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THREE FOLDS: SEARCHING FOR MILTON'S
PARADISE LOST BETWEEN MOSES, LACAN AND DERRIDA
-for Julia and Graham
Matthew Biberman
In a recent essay in Diacritics, Ken Reinhard and Julia Lupton summarize

Jacques Lacan's reading of the Decalogue in order to explore the affinities
between psychoanalytic notions of the self and intimations of the same as
found in the earlier tradition of Jewish hermeneutics, that is, of Midrash.
In doing so Reinhard and Lupton stress two points: first, that "the secular
subject is produced by religious discourses that precede and continue to
speak through it," and second, that this insight is performed dramatically
in the narrated event of the Decalogue, a text that has been subsequently
glossed theologically in language such that the resulting corpus is but an
earlier iteration of psychoanalytic formulations (7 1). Earlier, Jacques Derrida
also closely examined this same complex dynamic, though through his own
characteristic language. For him this theme meant taking up the question of
why the Freudian notion of nachtraglishkeit (the after-the-fact-ness of lived,
temporal reality) always already finds itself first in the language of the Jews.
Thus we find him, writing long ago in "Freud and the Scene of Writing,"
that "the irreducibility of the 'effect of deferral' - such, no doubt, is Freud's
discovery" (W&D 203); but always when Derrida uses a word like "discov-
ery" it has the effect of sending one hunting for a counter statement from
him that would rewrite such a claim into a reiteration (a trace of a trace).
R&L 38.3 (Autumn 2006)

177
1 78 Religion & Literature
This case, for instance, calls to be placed alongside his com

in that same collection (in his essay on Jabes) where he notes
thing that begins by reflecting itself is history. And this fold
the Jew" {W&D 65). Derrida goes on to gesture here, as he
increasingly in vain, for his signature to be ascribed to the
understands the reflexivity mechanism touched on in bot
be identified as a thing neither Jewish nor Psychoanalytical; n
nor Philosophical (or "theoretical" for that matter) but rath
simply as a "movement through which the book, articulated b
the poet, is folded and bound into itself and for itself, [and th
least at its outset, this movement] is not critical or specula
but is first of all, poetry and history" (65). Though Derrida w
through how such poetry would write itself, what he increasi
seems to me, is how this Jewish / Psychoanalytic linkage (
will shortly see, through Lacan) is made to trade in a profound
repression of the intervening Christian tradition, one that
participates in this articulation, this movement. Already then
that we can envision the three folds of my title: the first fold
and in Jewish writing, the third consists of the discourse of
(and ultimately of theory broadly construed), leaving buried i
second fold identified with and as the intervening Christian t
In this essay I seek to take up this very problematic as I thin
it, or at least to take up two aspects of this incomplete pro
just introduced: it is the occlusion of the Christian supplem
sketched topography. The second concerns the metaphoric
representation of this repressed tradition in the Freudian
transmitted through Lacan. Yet Derrida is not himself ab
fully - and thus explicate - this aspect of psychoanalytic
is, Derrida habitually handles these linguistic tropes and f
psychoanalysis uses to convey this repression of the Chris
but he does so without dwelling on this aspect of their me
know, however, that what I wish to write about here is out th
it, repeatedly noting that, though Freud's conceptualization
apparatus for perception is analogous in its working to e
machine or a writing machine, such an analogy is not the m
Freud is using to get at the entire operational structure of bei
short, is another aspect of the Freudian project, and Derrida id
having to do with "the sociality of writing as drama" {W&D 22
observes that its presence makes perception actually closer
than a machine. In the posthumous On Touching - Jean-Luc
again takes up the trail of what it must mean to imagine writ
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 79
act, a dramatic act. He does so through a m

this other structure that holds or deploys per
whatever this larger affect machine is, it is, f
as well, at base tactile), but never to my kn
address the ways in which an application o
basic macro sort, specifically an application
thinking of mechanical engineering, answer
mystery discourse. For in my eyes, it is mech
the unacknowledged vehicle (so to speak) w
and for philosophy if it is to complete the str
/ writing machine is made to situate itself.
cal engineering operates within psychoanal
sense of how the overt acknowledgement of
thus trades off of) the equally strong prese
in other words, I wish to entertain the pro
analogical language of mechanical engine
thematics of the Christian tradition are conve
of contemporary theoretical discourse, and
To take up this argument in earnest, I would

of the Lupton and Reinhard essay with wh
beautiful moments where they illustrate ho
the story of the Decalogue to model - in a
conceptions of subjectivity that are deeply
insights of the psychoanalytic tradition. Here
instance, their review of Rabbinic thought
commandment where we learn that the Ra
that the Lord's speech lacked "distinct pho
Rabbah it is recorded that God's voice had
then suggest that Rashi supplies one such e
lishment: that "after speaking the comman
to repeat them one by one; even this was m
and they begged Moses to shield them from G
the commandments for him." Lupton and R
the observation that here "God speaks twice
folds of tradition" (75). More precisely (if
could say that in this, the Big Bang moment t
the initial fold referenced here stands for the
where thought is understood as (to use Derrida's apt formulati

that 'inexorably' pushes outwardly, until it is throwing or jetti
dejecting, objecting, abjecting) the ego's subjectivity into exteri
27-8) where such spacing is understood as a void that is at
synthesis produced from thought's being incommensurable
When this logic is applied to the narrative of the giving o
what we get is a model for foundational or institutional creati
act is taken as both the site and the template for subseque
nesting of reflexive folds such that each successive act of e
itself a replication of the divine initial act of throwing itself
law, its subjectivity into space and, crucially, as exterior space
of the divine ego that is figured as generating in tandem a
fashion a set of ever-more folds both inside and outside.
The resulting model is a visual one; Freud will call it an action of spaltung
(or splitting). It yields two sets of oppositional arcs, each originating from
a center point; each traversing paths that take it away from the start point.
These sets of arcs (Freud will call them bahnung, pathways) are understood
to move at once deeper into the self (thus fashioning the space of interiority)
and at the same time ever outward into exterior space, so that these arcs are,
rather too quickly for my taste, interpreted as roads on a map. Of course,
the self here is being conceived along the lines of Descartes, and indeed the
entire tradition of western metaphysics, that is, as a monad, generated in a
process of what Derrida likes to call auto-affection. This movement is taken
up in our first level of analogy, the first fold, a movement of self-reflexiv-
ity that is seen fundamentally as a turn inward that generates an interior
landscape, a topography of the psyche that is then mapped via the tradition
of Freudian analysis (id, ego, etc.). The Derridean critique here is to point
out that this interior process is always at the same time an exterior process,
but that this realization is not fully addressed in psychoanalytic theory
(though one must note the efforts of Winnicott and the resulting school of
intersubjective object relations theory as a strand that is very much attuned
to this problematic). As Derrida has demonstrated (in "My Chances" and
elsewhere), with the exceptions of a few wild (and occult) surmises, Freud
strenuously excludes communication at the level of the unconscious be-
tween individuals: thus there is thought transmission but not telepathy in
the psychoanalytic worldview. To admit telepathy into the psychoanalytic
model, Derrida argues, is something Freud periodically proposes but then
removes from the table because it strikes him as unscientific, but, as Derrida
persuasively demonstrates, the collective model of psychoanalysis unwit-
tingly assumes telepathy, for the building of exterior space and our settled
collective perception of it (a phenomenon Freud dubs the reality principle)
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 8 1
inescapably demands the admission of such a

intrapsychic existence. '
As insightful as this observation is, it ends up b
allows Derrida to pass over the second fold wit
way that prevents him from giving a full accoun
own repression (verdrangung). In On Touching, he
the center point for the spaltung is the skin and t
that serves to incite the double arcs that result in
both inside the self and outside of it. Yet he th
He sees that this swinging motion, this rocking,
language of gross physics, of an object moving ba
next move is always from recognizing the splittin
izing it so as to be not simply pathways, but road
that "We should have to study together, genet
history of the road and the history of writin
course is to put the cart before the horse. It is to
is the object of this study (as we shall shortly see
For before you advance to the road, you need f
through the object that travels upon it. Cruci
up residence within this moving vehicle. For
of the second fold but of the third (which is e
networks, where a network is perceived as a m
from an omniscient aerial view). Thus we have
we have occluded in our action of forging a fir
does when he aligns writing with roads. Simply p
there must be a vehicle traveling upon that roa
obeying the logic of mechanical engineering, b
(typically, in terms of its carriage, its wheels) an
of its motor.
And yet in the Jewish / Lacanian account, such
repressed. To see how this is so let us return agai
discussion of the Midrashic tradition concernin
the giving of the law at Sinai as "the institution
and Reinhard wish to teach us is what Lacan m
subject as barred, as one who signifies in nothi
the possibility of a subject" (Lupton 85). To teac
to the story of the giving of the Decalogue is
historically, and to provide it with a primal illust
Hegelian affinities, such that one can glimpse
through which and as which subjectivity itself
Such a story (a historical fable designed to explain
is a clear example of the sort of analogical work I have rev

this instance we can say that for Lacan, this exercise at mo
begins at Sinai so that the primary cut into identity formatio
the event of the giving of the law (where the face of man is b
of God); it is a cut that is repeated in (or is understood to
punctuate) the nature of language; or alternately, the cut i
mark the name of God (as the tetragrammaton), and is m
absence of a divine echo to his voice, a gap that the Jewish
both fills and mimics, and that, in Lacan's reading, psycho
tivity reinscribes. Thus from this vantage point, with its
of theory on to midrash, we are able to see the giving of
as a moment of spaltung that releases a kind of infinitely e
bahnung, pathways being made through not one nor three but
channels: the long first stream of God's voice, the partial r
Mosaic translation, and Rashi's commentary. Moreover, it
that this multi-track moment of speech effectively swallows
for as Lupton and Reinhard note, it is recorded in the Mid
voice has no echo. This act of subtraction (the swallowed ech
rendered in theological discourse, also serves as an excellen
conveying at the same time how human meaning and being
reality in its ex-istence. In offering such an account, Lacanian
is able to stitch together the first and third fold through the r
second fold, for absent is both any serious engagement wit
tradition or with the analogical language of vehiculation.
it all: spaltung, bahnung and verdrangung and a resulting subj
a barring from which it is launched, all conveyed through
count. Equally important we have the dark tone, that sens
the swallowed echo) with which Derrida was always preocc
With this linkage between psychoanalysis and Midrash
now wish to place it in play with Miltonic notions of subjectiv
better understand the fold where Christianity, in its earlier m
supplements or rewrites this relation in its production of a re
using the same set of signifiers - the Decalogue. To engage in t
understand much more clearly how the echo of the Midrash
called up its abjection when we examine the strong revisioning
sions upon the figuring bound up by the rabbinic traditions th
Hebrew Bible passages. The first thing to note is that the
built from precisely the same material but for a minimal diff
the force of the New Testament, the focal point in the na
fashioning is thrown back from Sinai to Eden. Milton thus
converting a site of retrojection (e.g. the resituation of the Sin
Eden). And as for why, I believe his reasons are

by the eminent English Hebraist and Divine J
March 1660:
In divers places of the New testament, where mention is made of the law, and where
you would think it meant both of the tables, it comes off only with mention of the
second; "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments:" you would look for all
the ten; but look forward, and he pitcheth only upon the second table. So, Roman.
xiii.8 "He that loveth another, hath fulfilled the law;" you would look for the whole
of the law to be mentioned there; but look forward, ver. 9, and only the second table
is mentioned. So, Jam. ii.8, "If you fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture,"
&c: you would look for the whole law; but he concludes all under this "Thou shalt
love thy neighbor as thyself." Why, where are the duties of the first table. See, how
God put even all religion into the second table. As it is said, "Behold! how he loved
Lazarus:" so behold! how God loveth honest, up-right, charitable dealing betwixt
man and man. (vi. 272-3)
What Milton will teach via epic poetry, Lightfoot teaches here emblemati-
cally: the first tablet's duties (man's dealings with God) are dissolved into
the second tablet (the laws conjuring a relation between man and man that
would define what it means to act ethically, or as neighbors). Lightfoot's
lesson presupposes the same linkages and visualized schemes we see in the
rabbinic tradition and in psychoanalysis. Indeed in their essay, Reinhard and
Lupton dwell on this complex relation and even end with it: "the Lacanian
account of the subject of religion," they write, "delimits the space between
the two tablets as the arena of critical practice" (96). Here Lupton and Re-
inhard punningly allude to Lacan's famous reading of Antigone entombed
and so "between the two deaths," and they do so in order to reframe that
reading so that it can function as a kind of general model for how to theo-
rize subjectivity.2 Just as Antigone struggles to understand her existence by
apprehending it as a life lived between physical death and symbolic death,
so too must all of us think through what it must mean to perceive lived ex-
istence as the space that is ever opening (but ever bound) between the two
tablets of the Decalogue.
Yet there is a messianic leavening that appears in the Christian account.
You see this with Lazarus, a reversal of the dynamic Lacan sees: the falling
dissolution of the first tablet into the second calls forth a rising resolution-
ary movement that will reconstitute the first tablet. Consider, for example,
Lupton and Reinhard's observations concerning the alignment of the law
against idolatry (law 2, first tablet, second slot) with adultery (law 7, second
tablet, second slot):
As such, this Jewish discourse of the master constitutes "l'envers du discours psych-
analytique" - the underside, the reverse, but also the enabling ground, of psycho-
analysis, which will strive to recover knowledge as sexual, but will fin
of that knowledge the lack of a sexual relation. The is the insight of
and its exegetical coordination with the Second Commandment: the v
to language that casts humanity in God's likeness simultaneously releg
rewards of control over nature and sexual satisfaction to the order of
compensation that will frustrate more than satisfy this brave new subje
In contrast to this fully modern tragic vision (notable for its p

sees instead an early modern theological comedy, one that
same points, the same pathways even. Once again, the theo
from the Decalogue passages in Exodus and Deuteronomy t
Genesis 1.28, the primary positive commandment: "Be frui
ply." Except of course that for Milton it was not brave ne
the order of Shakespeare's Miranda - who are frustrated
rather a reconciled couple who with sad and slow steps m
(bahnung) from what the fiery cherub barred. And barred it
the violation of the primary negative commandment - the
to taste from the tree of knowledge.
Let us pause for a moment to align this pair of mutually mi
the Lacanian /Jewish account introduces the concept of th
as a cut that occurs at Sinai while passing over the Genesis
to taste from the tree of knowledge) that is if anything a far
emblem of the classical Freudian nexus uniting sexuality and r
body cuts; while on the other hand, the Miltonic / Christian a
to work through the trauma of what it cannot fully confr
centrality of Sinai and its effective ban on populating futurit
projection (the insight conveyed so clearly through the Jew
Job that casts him in a black comedy [e.g. "Where were yo
made. .."]). Yet regardless of such a ban, like Lazarus, Mil
Eve, in their repentance, rise to a second life through the for
show each other in accordance with the law of marriage (that
the Law of Genesis 1.28), which in turn contains the whol
table. For Milton, as for Lightfoot, this act of loving-kindness
foundation from which humanity can advance to the challenge
the first table. Here we have the strategy behind Milton's Uto
that is the substance of the prophetic books of Paradise Lost.
Milton's strategy reflects a complex engagement with the sa
that produces the Lacanian model of subjectivity. In contras
Miltonic self is a dynamic cut or fold, one that swallows Si
the primary cut) in an act of retrojection while at the same
forward a line of flight as harbinger (a two headed arrow o
the figuration a Lacanian cadence). Such a movement, I sub
nature of the second fold, but for it to be s

urge to envision these lines of flight as roads;
the trajectories of vehiculated subjectivity. As
motion and the workings of a motor postul
space, in short, between the two tablets is not
vehicles moving, as subjectivity reacts against
That is, the second fold moves outward, ejec
We see this development in Milton's epic m
of Adam and Eve after the Fall. Consider,
analysis of what has happened, expressly ca
problems: "both have sinned, but thou / Ag
and thee" (10.930-1). The phrasing here is
his first couple reasoning between the two
with all the presumable treasures of Gaul c
Lacanian with the Judaic. This knowledge ri
from sex and so avoid bringing children i
art, childless remain" (10.989). What else is
teaches Adam everything Lacan gestures towar
relation, and Adam, what else can he do bu
In this moment of the poem, I like to think o
back inside a Venetian courtroom, where we w
account involving ajew and three thousand d
away from Shakespeare's scene with the ex
A true son of Portia, Adam recognizes Eve'
be in violation of the law of marriage ("Be
Shylock, she is demanding a bond that wou
further twists Shakespeare's comic plot by hav
acknowledge the wrong and in a way that g
appear as unfallen (or only partially fallen)
Adam's counter-argument to severing the s
Eve not force him to violate both tablets as she states she has.3
This act of psychic splitting in Milton's narrative needs to be seen as
operating precisely in accord with Melanie Klein's theorization of the
concept, just as Derrida intuits: "Klein's entire thematic, her analysis of
the constitution of good and bad objects, her genealogy of morals could
doubtless begin to illuminate, if followed prudently, the entire problem of
the archi-trace, not in its essence (it does not have one), but in terms of
valuation and devaluation. Writing as sweet nourishment or as excrement,
the trace as seed or mortal germ. . ." ( W&D 23 1). Derrida sees how the first
fold which in his language is the space of the archi-trace, that sense of an
initiating absence that is felt as such so that we can say that it marks both
186 Religion & Literature
a past that never was and conveys a sensation of falling, a fa

outset ("an emptying of the semantic plenitude of the lex
never simply a falling from a position that is prelapsarian; i
that we must begin by proceeding "analogically toward
agency, something before the copula [e.g. "to be" as sim
extension - this is that]." (MP203). Milton anticipates such
position when he positions his readers in a way that for
to entertain an active fall in Eden but also the strategy o
stitution hammered out when Adam convinces Eve to resume their sexual
activities. Finally, and most importantly, Milton requires a superlapsarian
point view if we are to understand how it is that Eve has fallen not once
but twice, while Adam somehow clings to a belief that he has fallen only
once. Such life trajectories require the conceptualization of subjectivity
as a vehiculated experience, and a disengaged space from which to watch
these moving selves as they fall and seek to rise within the space that has
opened up between the tablets. Certainly, the superlapsarian vantage point
requires the third fold, yet as Derrida painstakingly points out, such a view
is not transcendental but rather a kind of transitional - Derrida uses the
word transferential - layer that enables the perception of what it means to
be engaged in vehiculated movement: to be falling and wish to rise, to be
fallen and at the same time unfallen (as Adam asserts).
Moreover, this semiotic structure also enables us to better understand
Adam's projection into the figures of Revelation. After all, it is critical
when reading Milton's ennobling of monogamy to remember that this act
of fidelity is always joined with an antithetical force that launches itself
through marriage. The description Milton provides of this generative force
is very interesting in how it models what Freud will call negation, the bar-
ring through which humanity realizes itself as living death. He tells Eve that
celibacy and other
...such acts
Of contumacy will provoke the Highest
To make death in us live: then let us seek
Some safer resolution, which methinks
I have in view, calling to mind with heed
Part of our sentence, that thy seed shall bruise
The serpents head;
No more be mentioned then of violence

Against ourselves, and wilful barrenness,
That cuts us off from hope, and savors only
Rancor and pride, impatience and despite,
Reluctance against God and his just yoke (10.1026-1045)
Engaged in a rational discussion with Eve

deploying the terms of the tablet schema o
the problem as a legal one, comprised of tw
ing to continue to honor the law of marria
this reparation will solve the second problem
(10.1035). Here we see Milton performing
reinscription, thus anchoring the falling actio
lation of the negative commandment and th
and its migration across the space between
to rest within the matter of the second wher
be driven, catalyzed, in a reverse upward m
the two tablets in an act, or set of actions
realize or re-realize a Utopian existence of t
his epic. By grasping both movements, the
of retrojection operates in tandem with an act
language of Revelation. I would ask that my re
that one thing that is missing from current p
projection is a failure to recognize that it lies
and in tandem with retrojection (and not i
rightly deduced long ago, about which mor
In the Sinai narrative the ontological cent
account turns not on death as that which v
Milton, however, consistently refigures religi
is, he and she) are oriented not around the
maton but rather around death as that whi
negative commandment (do not eat of the
for God - as the focal point (or in Lacanese
will call the subject into being) needs now t
constitutes the second fold. We see Adam do
Paradise Lost when he explains to Eve the natu
been set for them should they transgress:
This one, this easy charge, of all the trees

In Paradise that bear delicious fruit
So various, not to taste that only Tree
Of Knowledge, planted by the Tree of Life,
So near grows death to life, whate'er death is,
Some dreadful thing no doubt, for well thou know'st
God hath pronounced it death to taste that Tree, (4.421-28)
Clearly the fall into subjectivity for Milton is a fall not simply through the
word death, but through death as the covering to an encounter with God
that will enable him to understand death's meaning. Ma

Adam's admission of only breaking the first tablet, this the
to reverse or mitigate the Fall can be read as a rationalization
ing way: it is to consent to having introduced death only by
staking out a position that might just overcome death. R
explicitly accepts Eve's rendering of justice and nowhere
fectively gainsay this movement in the poem; he can no
simple reason that he needs this slight of hand or ideologica
base from which to launch his projection in which death
Thus death is parried in a way that will continue to orient t
idealist philosopher.
In an effort to get a better sense of how to read Adam'
his dialectical engagement with Eve, I would like to sugge
action as a kind of defensive wall of the sort sketched ou
and Leonardo in their work as military designers. In Sex
Graham Hammill reads such aesthetic projects as bindin
binary of war and civility, impulses that together induc
fashion, sexuality and its histories. To me the movement
example, da Vinci's war machines is to be identified with the
impulse we see in Milton retrojecting Sinai as a way to in
cal projection. Here we have ground for drawing a distinc
mechanism that produces the primary symptom that will
gious (or post-religious) subject as that which we speak of wh
the Sinai event with its spatial fold (the first fold) involving
and the mechanism of secondary symptom formation as t
occurring in the second fold as the interrelated movemen
and projection that follows from the resituating of the
anchored in Eden.
This development courts strongly the French Jewish philosopher Em-
manuel Levinas' explanation for why it is difficult to forgive such Germans as
the philosopher Martin Heidegger. The observation of Levinas' that I have
in mind appears toward the end of his reading of the Talmudic commen-
tary (Yoma 85a-85b) concerning the declaration that God does not forgive
transgressions committed by individuals against other individuals who have
not first sought forgiveness from the wronged party (again, we return to
the second tablet and the space between). Levinas writes, "One can forgive
many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is
difficult to forgive Heidegger" (25). Levinas' entire reading here is pitched
over the recognition that it is impossible to grant forgiveness to somebody
who you believe to be aware of his wrong only at the unconscious level. He
puts it thus: "How is one to forgive if the offender, unaware of his deeper
thoughts, cannot ask for forgiveness?" (25). Is n

be asked of Milton concerning Adam's refusal
primary signifier? Are we not here touching
pairing - Milton and Heidegger - that speaks
subjectivity is bound to a metaphysical struct
second fold's covering of God's name with t
question, it seems to me, speaks to the impa
her theorization of the literature and the secula
out from the sublationary dialectic that is m
the West. The sublation that did occur is quit
of Sinai by Eden as performed by Milton: th
the encasing of the primary symptom in a ti
(Derrida's "trace as seed or mortal germ"); t
concerning symptom failure, that is, the diagno
of remainders with their disfigurations that ar
body than the body in which they are contai
(the cuts, boils, scars, etc.) on that body than
signify, so that this repeated gesture, the signa
get at what we really are - all of this is to be
to work through secondary symptom formation
At the same time it is important to recognize
space as carved out in the second fold, is pre
firmly and rightly identifies as utopic space:
real social space... [that] is itself a result of s
tion" (15) and "a kind of mental space in whi
imagined as radically different" (16). Perhaps
the Miltonic self - the self, in short - of the
counter what it sees as the first fold's tragic pa
to be one of tragic action. By tragic passivity
with such assertions as we get in Lupton and
Lacan's strong formulation... religious discour
underwrites our very structures of being, subje
That is, the secular subject is produced by the r
and continue to speak through it..." (71). Righ
thinkers as Walter Davis reject this program
analysis does not lead to an existentialized subjec
lost "in the blind embrace of impersonal Driv
rior irony of one who looks on human phenom
a God who is 'indifferent, paring his fingern
argues to counter such misguided tragic pass
action, described thus: "That the task is to rever
destructiveness of the superego, by making deracination the r

lives to oneself"; he then defines deracination (a term with ob
to Heideggerian destructuring) as acting so as to "engage in sel
within the crypt of one's most deeply buried conflicts and
I introduce this debate not to adjudicate it but rather to use it
way this later critical impasse is itself a reinscription of the ac
in the second fold where we encounter Mil tonic retrojecti
Adam's declaration that he eats undeceived and does so to be with Eve is
clearly an act of tragic action, one that could be said to inaugurate u topic
space; the problem is that this opening is purchased at the expense of his
verbal refusal to join Eve in accepting the violation of the second tablet.
This bind leaves us in the impasse we just visited in our staged Davis vs.
Lacan face-off where we are left wondering which position is the right one,
which is deluded, psychotically in thrall to Thanatos, and which is the real
attempt to work through Thanatos?
Grasped so, we see that what lies before us is the question of stasis and the
lurch into motion. Put another way what I am getting at is that the models
of subjectivity that we have so far been considering in our population of
the second fold have at their core a conceptualization that involves not just
the movement of the self but of movement within the self. Internally these
figures for the self are not static and simply spatial, they are not mediums
with layers (or rings); rather, they are motive devices. Turning then to the
question of their internal movements, simple questions arise, and they in-
volve seeing the resulting system of the self as either a turning in place or
a circular motion such that the system returns the self to its starting point,
or it sees the self as in motion moving from its starting point to some other
point. In its complex form, the question takes the form of a superimposi-
tion, that is, it asks how is it possible for the self to both turn in place and
go somewhere. To turn internally without outward movement then is the
diagnosis that accompanies the recognition that the self is acting passively,
in thrall to Thanatos, caught in the first fold. To turn internally and to go
somewhere, in contrast, is to see the self acting tragically in its struggle with
Thanatos, a struggle that occurs within the space of the second fold (death
over god, outward motion over inward motion).
No surprise then that when it comes to Milton, the self as conceived is
fundamentally motive in this second sense: there is a dynamic interior ac-
tion and there is transport. For example when we read of Satan's journey
from hell to earth we learn that it is "rage" itself that "Transports our
Adversary, [Satan] whom no bounds / Prescribed" (3.80-2). And later,
in his account of sex, Adam will tell the angel Raphael that "here / Far
otherwise, transported I behold, / Transported touch; here passion first I
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 1 9 1
felt" (8.528-30). Such moments, it seems to me,

descriptions of the utopic self as "a momen
eddy or self-contained backwater within the ge
and its seemingly irreversible forward mom
proto-fictive formulations, Jameson's figures o
language: the exterior flows are open and abstra
performance of the most minimal of actions
that results in both its own containment and
Yet we see the profound connection that uni
equally spare rendering Milton provides here
self it is to be transported, most directly throu
ideally against or through boundaries). We se
ous way that the qualifier "no bounds" denie
to endow Satan with identity, but also in ho
kind of frictional transport at the edges of b
is denied to the devil.
Most famously elsewhere in Milton, of course, we have the re-staging
of the Fall's commencement through eating the prohibited fruit and thus
shattering the first tablet. Here the touching is rendered as a tasting - it is,
of course, through eating the apple that the Fall itself occurs. This stress
in Milton on taste / touch and not the Lacanian pair of voice / gaze may
very well be the most telling omission that results from the repression of
the second's folds presence in current theoretical discussion. Perhaps the
most significant departure from this silence is Derrida's provocative medi-
tation On Touching - -Jean Luc Nancy, a work to which I already referred. In
this posthumous text, Derrida offers a compelling argument to reconsider
Kant's claim that touch "is the foundation of the two other objective senses,
sight and hearing," and Derrida then attempts to situate this insight as the
unacknowledged foundation of Freud's "transcendental psychoanalytic
aesthetics" (41, 44). Yet throughout this bravura performance, never does
Derrida register the degree to which his commentary is an odd reinscrip-
tion of Milton's much earlier intervention. Derrida writes, "A certain tact,
a 'thou shalt not touch too much,' 'thou shalt not let yourself be touched
too much,' or even 'thou shalt not touch yourself too much,' would thus be
inscribed a priori, like a first commandment, the law of originary prohibi-
tion, the destiny of tactile experience" (47). It is especially striking that here
Derrida fails to note that he has introduced into the text the kind of crux on
which he made his reputation. After all, here he speaks of the prohibition
as one of touch and not of taste, and yet as any reader schooled sufficiently
to see that apple in Eve's hand knows: it is most assuredly about eating the
fruit, not just touching it. Moreover Derrida repeatedly notes the logic and
traditions that identify taste as a sub-set of touch, and he eve

with great insight, how Christianity rests on touch as a found
serve as a locus for what Nancy proposes as a deconstructio
ity, but nowhere does Derrida take up the Midrashic tradit
Milton, that uses the primal negative prohibition as a textu
to explore the ambiguity of taste / touch itself.
Though saddened at the prospect of having to do it for h
the point in Derridean fashion because it allows us to understa
richly explores the terrain of the tactile and the experience of
I proceed, I would ask my reader to bear in mind Derrida
conclusion (in the essay "How to Avoid Speaking") that "W
reduced to the condition of a threshold is being itself, being a
Although there are variations, the significance of which I
a moment, rabbinic commentary focuses on the discrepan
prohibition as given in Gen 2.17 and Eve's restatement of
("Ye shall not eat of it, and ye shall not touch it, lest ye di
rephrasing extends the ban from tasting so as to include touch
one rabbinic text (the Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer) presents the sto
went and said to the woman: Behold, I touched it [the Tre
die; thou mayest touch it, and thou wilt not die" (95); thus
tradition, when Satan tricks Eve, he takes advantage of her
the exact boundaries of the prohibition, which is to say her co
distinction between tasting and touching. Because she belie
touch the tree, Satan can perform a false demonstration that
that she can violate the divine decree with impunity. An al
of this Midrash appears in the £ohar. R. Judah said, "the w
serpent seduced Eve was as follows. He said to her: 'See, I
the tree and yet am not dead; you also put you hand on it and
(for it was he who added on his own account the 'neither
it')" (36a). Lupton and Reinhard, with whom we began, too
Rashi's; so it is fitting as I end to take us back: "to the com
of the fruit of the tree Eve added also the command not to to
Rashi observes, "and was thereby led to lessen the original
In Rashi, the serpent then talks Eve into touching the tree bef
nouncing that "there is no death in the eating of the fruit. . .
Literary critics who have noticed this apparent debt to
tradition have down so basically in the service of a larger
behalf of some particular Judaic source as the source of M
(see especially the work of Golda Werman and Jason Rose
opinion, in his incorporation of this Midrash, Milton is wor
is at variance among these rabbinic versions, after encount
in more than one form. Milton understand

taught Eve to say that it was forbidden to tou
teach herself? That is Rashi's conclusion. Did Satan teach her? That is The
^phar's conclusion. Did Adam teach her? That is the conclusion advanced in
the Avos d'Rabbi Nosson, a text that has not been advanced (so far as I know)
as a Miltonic source (Bereishis 1 16 n. 3). Aware of such disagreement, Milton
writes a poem in which he puts forward his own candidate for Eve's teacher
into error. It is a choice of rich suggestiveness in terms of the theme we are
now examining.
Let us see then, how the issue of taste and touch is handled in Paradise
Lost. In Book 7 touching the tree makes its first appearance, and it occurs
in Milton's address to the muse:
Say goddess, what ensued when Raphael,

The affable Archangel, had forewarned
Adam by dire example to beware
Apostasy, by what befell in heaven
To those apostates, lest the like befall
To Paradise to Adam or his race,
Charged not to touch the interdicted tree,
If they transgress, and slight that sole command,
So easily obeyed amid the choice
Of all tastes else to please their appetite,
thousfh wandVine. (41-50)
So, in his guise as the epic voice, Milton himself broadens the prohibition
to include not just tasting but touching. When therefore we bring rabbinic
teaching to bear on Paradise Lost it works to suggest that it is from Milton
that the evil inclination in Eve flows, and through this bond Milton acknowl-
edges that he is both Eve's offspring and her author. Notice also that after
Eve states the restriction as not to taste or touch, Satan announces that he
has touched, but the rabbinic gambit is not fully realized: there is no scene
in which he either touches the tree as a clear demonstration or throws her
against it. Instead after Satan's speech in which he exhorts Eve to taste the
fruit, what we get is the return of the epic voice, once again revealing itself
as the source of error:
Meanwhile the hour of noon drew on, and waked

An eager appetite, raised by the smell
So savory of that fruit, which with desire,
Inclinable now grown to touch or taste (9.739-42)
Equally important, Milton's use of "or" here makes it clear that he is not
using "taste" and "touch" as synonyms, and yet, of course,

this slippage Milton introduces the transmission of error into
the form of transmission chosen resists empirical logic; instea
through which error spreads is an inversion of reason, and
Derrida reminds us, Kant would have it that touch is the f
sight and hearing, then we see in Milton the anticipatory reve
as evil is woven into the poem's temporal fabric as the col
into touch, through (to use rabbinic phrasing) the improp
the law. And also, in Paradise Lost inversion introduces error
ent into the prelapsarian past, and error, in turn, becomes the
for the violation of the prohibition. Our recognition of su
demonstrates indirectly that there is a third level, a transfere
abling these complex transactions. The conclusion I would
to entertain is that Milton's introduction of a kinetic pat
backwards through time functions in advance as an intima
notion of nachtraglichkeit, and that this arc backwards appear
sary compliment to the projective arc forward into the po
eschatology. Seen this way the entire production, in its fi
exactly the abstract network that epitomizes the articulated lo
fold even as that fold will repress this intermediate presentat
for Milton, as it was for Derrida, is about the threshold, wher
at once the slippage from touching to tasting, as well as th
from the son back to the mother, a master web that reve
the past haunts the present, but how the future appears as a s
some version of the past imagined otherwise. Though about
following comment from Derrida captures quite distinctly thi
error in Paradise Lost "Must there not be some powerful utter
machine that programs the movements of the two opposing fo
and which couples, conjugates, or marries them in a given s
death" {Ear 29). The "utterance producing machine" Derri
not only explain the proliferation of error (by functioning
it also allows us to glimpse the shift from the second fold to
for here we have left behind our conception of vehiculat
taken up our discussion of networks: the machine produces
that are the networks of the third fold; however, Milton's aes
point to the machine's products so much as to its inner w
are witnessing an economy in Milton, it is not so much of
made by the machine outside of itself, but of the energy f
machine as it works to spit out the mediated networks where
up our residence.
Finally, as a way to conclude our examination of Milton
sentative architect of the second fold, consid

in Paradise Lost when upon hearing the Son
"could not bear / Through pride that sight, and
(5.665-6). Milton's Latinate diction facilitates
(carrying the vision of the Son) travels through
efforts. Thus we see first the self as a monad
the encounter with the vision of the Son create
impaired self (Lucifer / Satan) fashioned arou
that has opened in the text with Milton's ne
self-fashioning (a creation that falls out from
Son after hearing the proclamation). From su
(once we set to one side the question of the c
tial model appears, one that can be reduced
offensive line (itself an oscillation of sight and
and a defensive circle (understood as matter,
vertically within that horizontal line.4 Here
touch "is the foundation of the two other ob
ing" offers itself up as the view from the matt
image that demands the shift from touching
line passes through the defensive line, the wa
same time, such an insight is self-reflexive and
a transferential third perspective that is able to
material and see in the abstract the just descr
At this point, however, a good mechanical
knows nothing of Derrida, or this philosophic
we have simply arrived at the recognition o
our conceptualizations an element called (with
something redirecting energy, in this case, back
zontal (the up / down looping) and the vertic
such a differential has been a critical crux fo
time. It was no surprise, for instance, for me to
of "Leonardo da Vinci: Man, Inventor, Geniu
Science and Industry) that what the show reveal
ing the machines da Vinci obsessively drew is th
haunted by a desire to disclose the "concrete
elements that could be combined into ever m
creations. Here is a simple machine that turns
motion; over there is one that turns vertical
(Rothstein B7). Like da Vinci, I gained this i
employment as a motorcycle mechanic. Any
an effort to understand fundamentals and do
like power such principles possess. As a way to conclude th

investigation into western conceptions of existence, I will try
out some ways to complicate further the schema we have c
operating between the two tablets in the second fold: this loop
within / as the oncoming flow. I do so in the hope that these
will ultimately form more nuanced differential mechanisms in
modeling of post-Freudian subjectivity.
To do that I would like to return to HammilPs reading of th
and its counter move, what Hammill perceives as an intern
tering that he locates quite brilliantly in Bronzino's paintin
boys, where each portrait appears as the epitome of civility
Hammill, I recognize that the western religion binary is in pla
structuring the nascent secular set of ideals that comes to be
the twin projects of humanism and civic liberalism; he puts it
modern age explicitly turns from a theological version of hist
less it also recuperates Christianity's eschatological thinking in
political utopianism" (12).5 But here I wish to force a point. Ha
this conceptualization for the forces he sees as uniting those w
the portraits: "The civilized subject's introjection of judgment
response to the threat of war" but rather "a duplication of
between interiority and exteriority by which the subject attem
a limited sense of freedom, primarily economic, in relatio
mores that the civilized subject sees itself as having supe
many respects, I agree with this formulation, but we can shar
Lacan comments in his first Seminar that "One has to find another word
than introjection" to "designate [as] the correlate of projection" (83). Here
Lacan is pointing out that introjection and projection cannot be co-joined
because introjection, which is always the speech of the other, "introduces an
entirely different dimension from that of projection," and then as a way to
explain his dimension metaphor Lacan seizes upon the ego as that which,
switch-like, unites the different dimensions of introjection and projection
(83). Again what we have arrived at is the failure of the psychoanalyst to
pursue Freud's schema back to its source, to mechanical engineering, which
is to say the figural world of motive devices, a world birthed in the second
fold. Simply stated, in Lacan, the ego here is operating as a differential: it
converts the energy of introjection into the energy of projection.
At this point it is possible to expand our model of the motive system
operating between the two tablets, at least as I see it in its 2.0 instantiation,
that is, in the second fold signaled by Milton: the introjection is the circular
looping of the self that operates in the vertical plane, projection is here as-
sociated with forward motion, with the straight line speeding toward the right
margin. Its opposite in the horizontal plane is

of the three actions is the self understood as
designed to facilitate the re-routing of energy
this directly in his excellent primer "The La
alienation is a continuous flywheel movement
of signifiers, resulting in what Lacan called Uav
of the subject" (168). At the risk of being ch
metaphor here, I am going to work through the
the characterization of the subject as that wh
movement. One of the easiest flywheel design
a modern, conventional bicycle. On such a bi
consists of two cranks with pedals that are
around which a chain will run. The up / dow
provides the energy that is then spun by the cr
of the flywheel. The chain wrapped around the
differential as it enables the conversion of up
the forward or backward horizontal motion of the wheels. There are of
course variations: the original tall-wheelers, the velocipedes of the 1860's,
with their delicate and miniaturized trailing wheel, dispensed with any sort
of drive train so there was no chain running back, the rear wheel of the
carriage simply being used as is done on a child's tricycle today or as one
uses the rudder or tail-fin of a boat to steady the craft, but what we now
understand to be the platonic bicycle employs one chain running on a pair
of toothed sprockets. That is the sort of cycle I believe Freud contemplated
(of the type associated with the British manufacturer James Starley who
showed such a project to the world in 1 884) and indirectly served as a model,
though the mechanical motion just described was no doubt a ubiquitous
sight - think but of those massive gangs of train wheels cranking out of a
station. Please keep in mind then that I am not arguing that the self exists
as a metaphysical motive device on the order of a bicycle or a train. Rather
I am arguing that a set of interlocking psychoanalytic concepts now central
to theory derive from Freud's decision to model the mind using the discourse
of mechanical engineering, most especially motive transportation, and that
Freud's thought derives directly from a mode of conceptualization largely
inaugurated in the Renaissance where what I have I dubbed the second fold
gets fully deployed as a register of the western psyche.
I have already run through one such arrangement in order to posit ret-
rojection as the missing term to which Lacan refers. To get to it I passed
through two folds: the first fold which is a static face-off that features an in-
ward turn toward negation (and introjection), and a second fold that respon-
sively opens space through motive conceptions that turn on retrojection and
projection. I also made much of the rotation of Sinai back t

to clarify what I mean when I speak of the Miltonic self a
an example of the blot between the primary and secondar
or, to use Derrida's phrasing, Milton's epic is an early aesthetic
being as the place of thresholds - an encasing of the past that
time a flight from vehiculated subjectivity to mapping. De
understood all this better than I, but in his work I see a co
sion or slippage, and that action occurs most prominently whe
conceptualizations of the second fold (arcs of vehiculated m
third fold roads where we get the replacement of the mech
mindset sketched so far with mediational networks, models th
mimic first the language of electrical engineering and the
development brilliantly detailed by Friedrich Kittler). Derr
address this repression - this symptom of his - fully aware th
aim may appear modest, it would require the deconstruction o
to execute. It has been my hope here to offer a model illustra
is so. (Similarly, with Lacan, I hope I have demonstrated
because his theoretical system is a creature of the third fold -
derive from second fold operations and as such need to b
terms.) Finally I glimpse - and so would now like to speak o
facing us: in the words of Jameson, it "forces us precisely to
the break itself: a meditation on the impossible, on the un
own right" (232).
University of Louisville
NOTES
1 . Freud's unwillingness to acknowledge telepathy as a component is illustrated clearl

Derrida in "My Chances." There Derrida offers a reading of a Freudian anecdote in w
a coachman drove the good doctor (who was on his way to treat an elderly female pa
to the wrong address. To attach prophetic meaning to this turn events (and conclud
example, that the old lady would soon die) would be, for Freud, to practice superstitio
not psychoanalysis. On the other hand, for Freud, if he had simply driven himself t
wrong address, then that misfortune would have psychoanalytic significance. For Derrid
making this distinction "Freud seems immediately to exclude all communication between
coachman's unconscious and his own" ("My Chances" 22). Derrida convincingly con
that Freud closes down this line of thought in an effort to found psychoanalysis as
tive science and that "Lacan follows Freud to the letter on this point" (24). In The Unc
Nicholas Royle provocatively explores Derrida's surmise that it is "difficult to imag
MATTHEW BIBERMAN 199
theory of what they still call the unconscious without

neither confused nor dissociated" (qtd. in Royle 261)
my effort in this essay and Royle 's brilliant deconstr
notes exactly the same linkage at the analogical level of
(or post-structuralist discourse) is still operating with th
ambiance" (260). Thus he shows how all the new jargo
installed master term - reinscribes the Christian ideolog
ogy centered on "omniscience." Seen as such this marri
in literary criticism is then juxtaposed by Royle with th
and erratic web of flashing connections, periodically
individual minds, forming a kind of shifting map that
canny) heir of the psychoanalytic and the Judaic.
2. See especially "Antigone between the two deaths," T
83, where Lacan writes, "From our point of view man is
as a result of spectral analysis, an example of which I h
the joint between the imaginary and the symbolic in w
man to the signifier, and the 'splitting' it gives rise to i
created by Lupton and Reinhard in their pun (of Mosa
Antigone) is one deserving of deep reflection. This essa
that this "fold" (of deaths over tablets) can be situated
for example, we see Lacan's modeling working firmly
"moving along the joint of the imaginary and the sym
fundamentally by the discourse of mechanical enginee
experience, I suggest that, with Lacan, we are deeply lo
point, and it is not third fold discourse ("media" theor
takes its cue from network or systems theory where th
circuits, and solid state or laser technology). Rather L
imaginary is "old school" - on the order of motive s
motor and nothing beyond what you would hear in th
fifty years ago.
3. In what can only be described now as a fascinating e
Miltonists have worked hard to sever the vital connectio
speare. For example, Albert C. Labriola concludes his entr
clopedia ( 1 979) by declaring that "The numerous paralle
and Milton are not very meaningful," and that "subst
(vol 7, 191). Now contrast that with the prevailing vi
Holly Hanford's far more reasonable intuition that th
Shakespeare permanently determined Milton's mode
and situations. . .we seem to catch in the representatio
Eve an echo of similar relations of Iago, Othello, and
remorse a parallel to the soliloquy of King Claudius" (2
against this isolationist current, among them John Guill
The connection I am positing between Shakespeare's M
on the method espoused by Hanford, namely an appre
4. But see also Susannah B. Mintz, Threshold Poetics:
insightful and innovative account that utilizes the work
Benjamin to argue that Milton explores in his poetry "
the complexities of interrelationality" (26).
5. I agree fully with Slavoj Zizek that utopic projecti
itself cannot be said to constitute the appearance of what Freud will

tion. As Zizek notes,
the standard theory of 'projection,' according to which the anti-Semite 'projects' onto t
the disavowed part of himself is not sufficient. The figure of the 'conceptual Jew' can
externalization of the anti-Semite's 'inner conflict.' On the contrary it bears witness
with) the fact that the anti-Semite is originally decentered, part of an opaque network
logic elude his control. (195)
Zizek here rightly notes the need to distinguish between normative p

as a kind of garden variety exercise in border maintenance (Carl Sch
test), and the kind of psychotic projection we find in what I call th
destroying violence (what Walter A. Davis terms now "ecocide") whe
understood as a projection (P), the doing of a paranoid (P), seeking to
sublimely through a blockage (B, hence PPB). Zizek's normative projec
of distinguishing that is classically oedipal and wards off the fall into
the inevitable cost of misalignment. This misalignment in Milton is f
as shifting the nonce word from God as Logos to a God reached via
negative prohibition that is Death.
WORKS CITED
Bereishis: Genesis - A New Translation with a Commentary Anthologized from Talmudic, Mi

Rabbinic Sources. Trans. Meir Zlotowitz. Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1989.
Davis, Walter A. Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9-11. Ann Ar
Press, 2006.
Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, and Translation. Trans. Avital
Ronell and Peggy Kamuf. Ed. Christie McDonald Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988.
and Literary Theory. Eds. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser. New Yor
1989. 1-70.
text as MP.]
Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature. Eds. Wil

Smith. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984. 1-32.
text as W&D]
Guillory, John. Poetic Authority: Spencer, Milton and Literary History. New York: Columbia UP,
1983.
Hammill, Graham. Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 2000.
Hanford Holly, James. A Milton Handbook. 4th Ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1946.
The Holy Bible: An Exact Reprint Page for Page of the Authorized Version [1611]. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1832.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.
New York: Verso, 2005.
Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop- Young and Michael
Wutz. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
Labriola, Albert C. "Shakespeare, William." In A Milton Encyclopedia. Gen. Ed. William B.
Hunter. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1979.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho- Analysis. New York: WW Norton,
1978.
Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: WW Norton, 1992.
Alain Miller. Trans. John Forrester. New York: WW Norton, 1988.

Lightfoot, John. The Whole Works of John Lightfoot. Ed. John Rodger
Dove, 1822.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Nine Talmudic Reading. Trans. Annete Aronowic
Indiana UP, 1990.
Lupton, Julia Reinhard and Kenneth Rienhard. "The Subject of Re
Ten Commandments." diacritics 33.2 (Summer 2003): 71-97.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Scott Elledge. New York: Norton, 197
Mintz, Susannah B. Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity. Newa
2003.
Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer. Ed. and Trans. M. Friedlander. New York: Harmon Press, 1965.
Rosenblatt, Jason. Torah and Law in Paradise Lost. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.
Rothstein, Edward. "Decoding the World's Principles, One Machine at a Time." The New
York Times, 30 May 2006: Bl, B7.
Stevens, Paul. Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in Paradise Lost. Madison: U of Wis-
consin P, 1985.
Toliver, Harold. Transported Styles in Shakespeare and Milton. University Park, PA: Penn State
UP, 1989.
Verhaeghe, Paul. "Causation and Destitution of a Pre-ontological Non-entity: On the
Lacanian Subject." Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Other Press, 1999.
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Werman, Golda. Milton andMidrash. Washington DC: Catholic U of America P, 1995.

Zizek, Slavoj. "The Seven Veils of Fantasy." Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Ed. Dany
Nobus. New York: Other Press, 1999, pp. 190-218.
The Z°har. Trans. Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon. New York: Saphrograph, n. d.

Three Folds: Searching For Milton's "Paradise Lost" Between Moses, Lacan and Derrida

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The University of Notre Dame

In a recent essay in Diacritics, Ken Reinhard and Julia Lupton summarize

R&L 38.3 (Autumn 2006)

This case, for instance, calls to be placed alongside his com

act, a dramatic act. He does so through a m

To take up this argument in earnest, I would

where thought is understood as (to use Derrida's apt formulati

inescapably demands the admission of such a

is a clear example of the sort of analogical work I have rev

Eden). And as for why, I believe his reasons are

In contrast to this fully modern tragic vision (notable for its p

nature of the second fold, but for it to be s

a past that never was and conveys a sensation of falling, a fa

No more be mentioned then of violence

Engaged in a rational discussion with Eve

This one, this easy charge, of all the trees

that will enable him to understand death's meaning. Ma

thoughts, cannot ask for forgiveness?" (25). Is n

destructiveness of the superego, by making deracination the r

felt" (8.528-30). Such moments, it seems to me,

traditions that identify taste as a sub-set of touch, and he eve

in more than one form. Milton understand

Say goddess, what ensued when Raphael,

Meanwhile the hour of noon drew on, and waked

using "taste" and "touch" as synonyms, and yet, of course,

sentative architect of the second fold, consid

like power such principles possess. As a way to conclude th

margin. Its opposite in the horizontal plane is

projection. I also made much of the rotation of Sinai back t

1 . Freud's unwillingness to acknowledge telepathy as a component is illustrated clearl

theory of what they still call the unconscious without

itself cannot be said to constitute the appearance of what Freud will

Zizek here rightly notes the need to distinguish between normative p

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