ABSTRACT
I have already been indebted to Professor Derrida when I talked about biblical scenes of writing in the context of iterability. When Moses is given the tablets of the law, before he has even had a chance to promulgate it, he dashes the tablets to pieces. The Law that the people are constantly urged to remember is lost and given again, the Torah itself must be rewritten; the one we have is a copy and it in turn proliferates further copies: whatever was written was not the last word, for there are numerous codes of law in the Bible, never identical. And when we add the proliferation in the “oral tradition,” a tradition that is in fact written in the Talmud, a twice-given law suggests not only that the original is destroyed and all we have is a copy and all we can have are copies, but that the copies will keep coming-as the scroll of the book of Deuteronomy is found, as Jeremiah’s scroll is dictated again. These stories suggest the infinite in both their narrative of origin, defying the concept of “the original,” and their end, defying a final, definitive version. As such, they point to the infinite proliferation of the law. But this is already the chapter of my last book, The Curse of Cain, even if I will doubtless endlessly proliferate it, both as a Jew who must endlessly copy out the Bible and as a postmodern critic.1
